
































AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Works By 
DANIEL A. POLING 


An ADVENTURE 
In EVANGELISM 
The Story of Twice-Born 
Men on “The Avenue,” 
$1.50 


Learn To Live 
Straight Talks, $1.50 






Nav § 1 1925 


An Adventure, 1), gu 
Evangelism 


A STORY OF TWICE-BORN MEN ON 
“THE AVENUE” 


es By 
DANIEL A. POLING, Litt.D., LL.D., 


Co-Minister, Marble Collegiate Church, New York 
Associate President, The United Society 
of Christian Endeavour 





New York CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LoNDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, McMxxv, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


Printed in the United States of America 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


To 
My Uncle, 
Daniel Vandersall Poling, 
A Minister of the Church and 
A Friend to Man. 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https ://archive.org/details/adventureinevangOOpoli 


Introduction 


ONGREGATIONAL Evangelism in the Marble 
C Collegiate Reformed Church of New York City, 

as described in the following chapters, had in 
its initiation and development the favoring atmosphere 
of the ministry of David James Burrell. For nearly 
thirty-five years Dr. Burrell, the Senior Minister of 
the Collegiate Church of New York, has poured out 
his life in a message of unsurpassed evangelical and 
evangelistic fruitfulness. 

The writer is particularly indebted to The Christian 
Endeavor World, The Christian Herald and The Contt- 
nent for the privilege of using the material contained 
in four of the chapters of this book, which appeared 
first in the form of articles in these publications. 

The Sermon-Addresses, which begin with Chapter 
V, have in every instance been preached on Sunday 
evening in the pulpit of the Marble Collegiate Church. 
They have invariably concluded with the simple Gospel 
invitation. 


DRAG: 


Marble Collegiate Church, 
New York. 


y 





Contents 


I 
METHODS OF WORK 


. “Tur ONE WHo Is ABLE” 
. THE Cross ABOVE FiFtH AVENUE . 
. It HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND 
. STOP SLANDERING YoutH! . 


II 
SERMON-ADDRESSES 


. TuHree Roaps To PowER 

. THE PHARISEE’s THANKSGIVING 
. WuHo Enters CANAAN? 

. Five Facts For Fainine Farts! 
. A NEw CatTHEDRAL AGE 

. Doust Your Dousts 

. THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 

. On Guarp! 

. How to Hear . 

. Is THE WoRLD A SMALL Posen? 
. WINNING OVER WorrY 

. WHEN RELIGION SPOILS Acker rs 
. THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 
. WHat A MAN TakEs witH Him 


9 


13 
24 
31 
37 


53 
62 
70 
79 
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Pike 
. 121 
133 
. 143 
AUB 
. 162 
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METHODS OF WORK 


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I 
“THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 


NE evening, about three years before the writ- 
ing of this book, a man of distinguished ap- 
pearance presented himself at the altar of the 

Marble Collegiate Church and was introduced by one 
of our young men. He had raised his hand in response 
to the evangelistic invitation. With cynicism in his 
voice he said: “‘ What can you do for me?” 

“Nothing,” I replied, ‘“ absolutely nothing, but I 
can take you to One who will answer your question.” 

During the week we met twice in the church study. 
At the close of the second interview the man arose from 
his knees with a light on his face “ that never was, on 
_sea or land.” His first words were a question. The 
question was not intended as a rebuke. It was spoken 
in apparent surprise, and out of a grateful heart. 

‘“* How does it happen,” he asked, “‘ that, because I 
made a promise, I have been going to church at least 
once every week, but until last Sunday night I was 
never invited to come to the foot of the Cross?” That 
question is still ringing in my ears. } 

Our simple evangelistic programme is based upon 
the principle that the supreme business of the Church 
is leading men and women to Jesus Christ, sustaining 
and strengthening them in the Christian life, training 
them for and engaging them in Christian service. Let 
it be mentioned in passing—mentioned, I say, since 
there is no time for an extended statement—that this 


13 


14 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


evangelistic emphasis is blood-brother to a programme 
of social service. As I write, one of the most effective 
social survey and settlement workers in New York 
City is a brilliant individual who, one year ago, stood 
at the close of a Sunday evening service to express a 
desire to become personally acquainted with Jesus 
Christ. 

An average of seven hundred business-girls and 
women pass through our parlors every Tuesday for 
luncheon together and a series of fifteen-minute inspi- 
rational and religious addresses. ‘There are self-help 
classes of various kinds, special lectures and social 
gatherings. 

But to build the new world we must have first new 
world builders. If our modern civilisation is learning 
anything today, surely it is learning that redemption is 
more than an intellectual interpretation, sin more than 
a name, the Atonement more than a theory, and Jesus, 
as the Christ, more than a myth. No NEW WORLD CAN 
THERE BE WITHOUT NEW WORLD BUILDERS, AND ONLY 
Jesus CHRIST CAN MAKE NEW CREATURES OUT OF MEN. 

But it is the very simple story of a very small begin- 
ning in congregational evangelism on Fifth Avenue 
that I am writing about. I do not hesitate to tell the 
story, for it is a very modest story as to results, and 
one that may be told without the presumption that 
might attach to more distinguished achievements. 

For a period of five years, now, it has been our in- 
variable custom, at the close of the Sunday evening 
service, to extend an evangelistic invitation. With one 
exception, through this period, there have been definite 
responses to every such invitation. The number has 
varied from three to above thirty. The invitation 
itself is based upon three assumptions: (1) That in 


“THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 15 


every congregation there are men and women who 
need and desire God. (2) That God’s Spirit is always 
active. (3) That the least we should do is to make it 
possible for those who need Him to meet “ the One 
who is able.”’ The method is simple. Following the 
sermon, whatever its theme, a member of the choir 
sings a Gospel hymn. The audience is requested to 
bow in prayer and the announcement is made that if 
there are those present who have burdens of any sort 
for which they would seek Christ’s strength, or sin 
from which they would ask His release, they make 
themselves known by standing or by lifting their 
hands. All such are assured that they will be remem- 
bered in the closing prayer preceding the Benediction. 
Never more than three minutes is consumed in making 
and completing the invitation. The principle involved 
is what may be termed “ the line of least resistance.” 
It has been written that “ God is hard,” and certainly 
Christianity is not made more attractive by stripping it 
of stern qualities and manly virtues. 


“The Son of God goes forth to war, 
A kingly crown to gain,” 


is forever the recruiting challenge of the Church of 
Jesus Christ. Why, then, this so-called “ line of least 
resistance ” programme in evangelism? It is true that 
such a policy makes it quite possible for a “ hardened 
sinner ” to raise his hand beside a saintly woman who, 
in her sorrow, prays for comfort. And I have seen a 
profligate make his first appeal for mercy behind a 
weeping widow’s gown of bereavement. 

But Nicodemus, who came to Jesus in the night, 
under cover of the darkness, was not rebuffed. The 


16 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Master Teacher who is our leader both in preaching 
and in practice, made it easy, very easy, for timid 
people to take their first steps toward Him. Often 
He went with them before He called them to Him. He 
braved the criticism of churchmen and rulers when He 
sat at the table of Zacchzeus. We constantly find Him 
adapting His words to the circumstances, the social 
environment, the intellectual level of inquirers. Nico- 
demus was the only man to whom He said, ‘‘ Ye must 
be born again.” Yes, Nicodemus was the only one to 
whom He said it, though no one ever fully finds Him 
who does not enter into the experience. To Peter and 
others like him, He said simply, ‘‘ Follow Me.”’ Mas- 
terful in its simplicity is the way of Jesus with men, 
and we make no mistake in following Him. 

The plans for a “ follow-through,” though unob- 
trusive, have been measurably effective. Forty 
“posts ” for personal workers have been designated. 
Each personal worker occupies his “ post” at every 
service, or supplies a substitute. The personal work- 
ers’ group, made up generally of Christian Endeavour- 
ers, has a chairman and a secretary, and meets for con- 
sultation and prayer following the mid-week service. 
Always those who stand or raise their hands are cor- 
dially greeted, following the Benediction, and invited 
to meet one of the ministers or any other member of 
the staff. As a rule, and the rule is seldom if ever de- 
parted from, a personal worker does nothing more than 
extend this perfectly natural invitation. This policy 
enables us to use effectually many naturally timid 
young people. It also avoids the disaster of embar- 
rassing those who do not wish to be questioned or 
conversed with personally. Very recently, one of our 
less experienced personal workers introduced to me a 


“THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 17 


former war officer of the American Expeditionary 
Force, who had raised his hand in the closing period 
of the service. The young worker, who would have 
felt himself quite unable to hold any sort of conver- 
sation with the gentleman, in a perfectly natural and 
easy Manner gave me an opportunity to have a con- 
ference with him. 

One out of three such invitations brings a favorable 
response. Interviews are arranged to suit the con- 
venience of the individual. In every instance an 
earnest effort is made to follow the case through to a 
decision. 

The Marble Collegiate Church is a ‘“‘ down-town ”’ 
church with all the peculiar and baffling ‘‘ down-town ” 
problems. A comparatively small number of those who 
lift their hands or stand in these services unite with the 
local church. They come from all sections of the coun-. 
try and world, and many of them are related by cor- 
respondence to churches in other cities. Even so, 
ninety-one have been received into the fellowship of 
the Marble Collegiate Church congregation during the 
recent ten-months’ period. Also, it should not be 
overlooked that the invitation extended is a general 
one and that the problems entered into are not con- 
fined to those individuals who are seeking Christ as 
Lord and Saviour. 

During the recent eight months more than three hun- 
dred and fifty have responded to the invitation by 
standing or raising their hands. 

Through one period of the winter an old-fashioned 
‘‘ Sing ” was conducted in the parlors of the church 
following the close of the evening service. People 
stood and sang familiar hymns while the ministers and 
their associates moved about informally. The attend- 


18 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


ance ran from one hundred and fifty to two hundred 
and fifty. There was never an address and the Bene- 
diction was pronounced absolutely on time! We shall 
certainly use the plan again. 

During the six weeks preceding Easter, on what is 
called ‘‘ Marble Collegiate Family Night,” a class for 
our personal workers, or a special Bible Class is con- 
ducted. Each personal worker signs a simple declara- 
tion of purpose and keeps a card, a duplicate of which 
is in the hands of the pastor. On this card are entered 
the names of those in whom the personal worker is 
especially interested and for whom daily definite 
prayers are offered. 

How entirely apart from the personality and mes- 
sage of the minister the value of this evangelistic invi- 
tation may be, we have seen demonstrated repeatedly. 
On one occasion, following a citizenship address to a 
special audience, the temptation was strong to depart 
from the customary practice. However, the invitation 
was extended. More than thirty responded. 

Would the writer follow this plan in his Sunday 
morning services? Yes. The nature of the invitation 
fits it naturally into any programme. It contributes 
to the life and spirit of a morning as well as of an 
evening service, and the time involved eliminates the 
last possible objection. For some time the writer has 
made it his rule to close every sermon, anywhere, with 
an invitation of this sort,—Lenten lecture, Y. M. C. A. 
meeting, mass-meeting, noonday-talk to working girls, 
—and why not? Who knows when there may be some- 
one present needing an immediate opportunity to get 
into touch with the Great Friend and Physician. In- 
deed, we find that under circumstances of every sort 
and in every circumstance of public Christian assem- 


“THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 19 


blage, there are men and women who need to meet 
without delay “ the One who is able.” 


THE OUTDOOR PULPIT 


Beginning two years ago with a series of talks by a 
missionary expert in street-speaking, we instituted an 
open-air pulpit at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 
Twenty-ninth Street,—at the noon hour one of the 
most congested corners in New York City. These 
meetings were held daily, Saturdays and Sundays ex- 
cepted. On Sunday evening, preceding the regular 
service, the minister spoke out-of-doors for ten min- 
utes. The Young People’s Society adjourning early 
gave the nucleus of a congregation and supplied the 
singing. Beginning in May of last year the plan was 
perfected and the programme enlarged. An attractive 
platform was built in the arch of the doorway facing 
the street and avenue. In co-operation with the 
Greater New York Federation of Churches, services 
were conducted daily until November 1st. Brief ser- 
mons were preached by thirty-five of the ministers of 
New York, representing all denominations. 

As a rule, the same speaker appeared for an entire 
week. Leading soloists of the Marble Collegiate 
Church, and other prominent vocalists, sang Gospel 
hymns, and a talented trumpeter played. Speakers 
and musicians wore the academic gown. We found 
that the use of the gown at once distinguished these 
services in a city of many street meetings and gave to 
their message a touch of impressiveness and a note of 
power. During the first six months of the outdoor 
meetings, more than thirty thousand people were in 
attendance, in addition to those who moved to and fro 
on the street, and more than eight thousand copies of 


20 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the Scriptures, in Yiddish, Italian and English, were 
given to those who asked for them,—a daily average 
of more than sixty. The announcement was always 
made that the little books were available, but a care- 
less general distribution was avoided. 

The message of the outdoor pulpit is constructive, 
evangelical, patriotic and non-controversial. From 
the lips of New York’s outstanding preachers and 
most talented musicians, the good news of Jesus is 
told daily to an increasing number of people. As was 
said in the opening service of the campaign, “If with 
our message here we shall send a careless Hebrew to 
his synagogue, an indifferent Catholic to his cathedral, 
or a neglectful Protestant to his church, and if we 
shall make better citizens, we shall be glad. We shall 
trust the Spirit of God to complete and perfect the 
work we have begun.” 

From the Sunday evening services, as well as from 
the outdoor meetings—although, of course, there are 
more definite results to tabulate from the former— 
come many stories that belong to yet another volume 
of Twice-Born Men. 

When one contemplates the vast and growing, the 
appalling spiritual problems of New York City, so 
small a thing as we are doing does not warrant a pre- 
tentious setting. But it is my earnest hope that all 
churches shall on every possible occasion open the way 
for those in need to meet ‘‘ the One who is able,” and 
I feel, too, that the very modesty of our success, with 
the simplicity of its plan, will be an encouragement 
to others. 

Let this chapter close with two living illustrations! 

At the close of a Sunday service, some two years 
ago, among those who were introduced to the minister 


“THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 21 


by the personal workers, was a young man who did 
not give his name. He stated positively that he did 
not desire an interview, said that he had been attend- 
ing the services for three months, that several times he 
had raised his hand for prayer but had always refused 
to wait for the introduction at the close,—now he 
merely wished me to know that he felt the need of 
being remembered in a special way. Two weeks later 
this young man came forward again and asked for an 
interview. We met on the next afternoon. I told him, 
as is my custom, that he need give me no information 
concerning himself, that I was entirely at his com- 
mand, but that, of course, my ability to help him would 
be largely determined by his willingness to trust me. 
He did not give me his name. 

Two weeks later we met again, and now the story 
was told! He had been in the flying service during 
the War, under another flag than ours; was shot down 
and terribly burned. Scars cover his body. As a 
result, very largely of physical and nervous demoral- 
isation, the after-War period was for him a virtual 
Inferno. His family is a leading family; his father a 
distinguished citizen of his own country. The boy 
came into the great “light,” was soundly changed. 
Until removing from New York he remained one of 
our most faithful attendants. One Christmas Sunday 
evening I found myself standing face to face with his 
father and mother, and only those who have lived to 
experience such an hour can know what the meeting 
meant to us all. 


“‘ TAKE A CHANCE! ” 


“Take a chance!” a young profligate said, as, 
through bleary, boyish eyes he looked at me. The 


22 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Sunday evening service had closed only a few minutes 
before. Perhaps a dozen men and women had stood 
to request an interest in the closing prayer. One of 
the officials of the church had brought to me a young 
man soaked to the skin—the night was a downpour— 
and brazenly drunk. He wanted money, and his story 
was utterly impossible. He told me that he was a son 
of wealthy Southern parents; that he had gotten into 
trouble in New York City and lost his money; that his 
baggage was being held at a prominent hotel for an 
unpaid bill, and, finally, that a representative of his 
family would meet him at the Waldorf Astoria on 
Tuesday afternoon and “ fix things up.” He needed 
fifteen dollars to meet his immediate necessities and 
would repay me—“ sure! ” 

I knew that he was lying, and my friend had started 
him for the side entrance when he blurted out, ‘‘ Take 
a chance! ” What it was that prompted me to give 
that miserable boy another look I do not know (per- 
haps the omnipotence of a mother’s prayer), but I did 
look at him again. A New York preacher is deceived 
so often, and by those who tell much more ingenious 
stories than this lad had told, that the disgust with 
which the official of the church received my request 
to advance him fifteen dollars and charge the same to 
my personal account, was entirely warranted. 

The young fellow went squashing out, half-sobered 
by my parting word. “ Pll take a chance,” I said, “as 
wild a chance as any gambler ever took for gold. I'll 
take the chance but, oh, boy, for the sake of many 
another needy fellow who will come to this church for 
help, as well as for your own, make good—play 
the man! ” 

Let me be perfectly frank: not every story that 


“THE ONE WHO IS ABLE” 23 


begins as this one does, ends in a return and a remit- 
tance. But the boy from the South came back, came 
back clean and polished, came back with fifteen dollars 
and to take me to the Waldorf Astoria, where I met a 
gracious Southern lady, who stood there in the stead 
of the boy’s invalid mother, to thank the old Fifth 
Avenue Church that had gambled with the sin of the 
City for the soul of her son,—gambled and won. 


II 
THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 


HE entire programme of the Marble Collegiate 
year is planned with congregational evangelism 
in mind. Perhaps a hurried review of a few 
special features and incidents will give at least an im- 
pression of the ‘‘ atmosphere ” which we seek to create. 
One winter afternoon as I approached the church, 
my eye was caught and held by a great net banner, 
swung across the Avenue between the tower and the 
high office-building opposite. The banner itself had 
been there for some time and the invitation it carried 
to participate in some philanthropic project had been 
read by hundreds of thousands of people. But it came 
now to me with an altogether different message. We 
were nearing the Lenten season. Why not an Easter 
banner over Fifth Avenue? The suggestion received 
the hearty commendation of the officials of the church, 
but it was thought that it would be difficult, if not im- 
possible, to secure the consent of the city officials. 
However, the Church Master made formal application 
to the responsible officers and a favorable reply was 
recelved almost at once,—another indication of the 
fact that we should never be sure that anything is 
impossible. 

The banner itself was a huge affair, with great 
crosses on either side of the flaming legend, ‘“ He is 
Risen! ” At the bottom of the net which carried the 
words and the symbol of the Christian faith, was an 


24 


« 


THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 25 


announcement of the Lenten programme of the church. 
For two weeks before Easter this Resurrection declar- 
ation challenged the mighty city. The attention of 
hundreds of thousands of people was attracted by it 
and vast numbers must have felt the sublime lift of 
the message. Perhaps of all the communications which 
came to the church as the result of this “‘ experiment ” 
—for such it was—a visit from a venerable Wall Street 
broker was the most significant and impressive. He 
called at the minister’s study and, speaking with un- 
usual emotion, said, “‘I was on top of the ’bus this 
morning, riding up from Washington Square, when I 
saw your banner in the distance and thought that it 
was a Red Cross flag. When we came near enough to 
read the words, I had a shock. I was a smalltown boy, 
sir—went to the old Methodist Church in the arms of 
my mother, before I could walk. I’ve been anything 
but a churchman, though, for the past forty years. 
That banner must have been a magic carpet—it took 
me back home.” The conclusion of the interview has 
become an experience sacred to two men. 

‘Far more than a publicity feature of a Lenten plan, 
the slogan, “‘ He is Risen! ” and the crosses flanking 
it, became to the church. More and more we are 
recognising the fact that the single elements of a plan 
must be thought of and thought out as part of a con- 
nected whole. To change and mix the figure, the ban- 
ner was one link in the chain that encircled and bound 
together the church year. 


INTERDENOMINATIONAL CO-OPERATION 
A vital feature of the educational and spiritual life 
of the church is the series of lectures conducted each 
fall in co-operation with the Greater New York Feder- 


26 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


ation of Churches. These lectures are delivered in the 
afternoon, on the first five days of the week, over a 
period of from two to four weeks. Such outstanding 
scholars of the Church as Dr. G. Campbell Morgan 
and President-Emeritus Francis L. Patten, of Prince- 
ton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, 
have been the speakers. 

Again New York has been a surprise! Magnifi- 
cent audiences gather daily during the week, and on 
Sundays the large auditorium of the church has 
been overflowed. The messages invariably have 
been evangelistic and non-controversial. By “ non- 
controversial ” I mean that they have been unfailingly 
constructive. Always, too, they have made easier the 
regular Sunday and Wednesday invitations of the 
minister. They have also brought the local church 
into closer fellowship with the great sisterhood of 
churches in the Metropolitan district and have enabled 
her to have a part in the larger ministry of Christ 
which no individual church and no one denomination 
can ever adequately care for alone. 

The districting of the City of New York by the 
Greater New York Federation of Churches, which has 
brought together pastors who, in a measure at least, 
face similar problems and opportunities because of 
their residence and ministry in the same communities, 
has had a direct and helpful effect upon all our 
activities. 

Dr. Morgan’s subjects for one thirty-days’ cam- 
paign were: 

CHRIST AND THE CurRE OF SOULS 
or 
The Methods of Jésus with Indwiduals. 
Introductory © His Knowledge of Man and Men 


THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 27 


His Method with the Cautious: ANDREW. 
His Method with the Elemental: SIMON. 
His Method with the Unimpressive: PHILIP. 
His Method with the Guileless: NATHANAEL. 
His Method with the Gracious: His Moruer. 
His Method with the Intellectual: NICODEMUS. 
His Method with the Disillusioned: THE WoMAN oF 
SAMARIA. 
His Method with the Derelict: THE IMPOTENT 
MaN. 
His Method with the Condemned: THE SINNING 
WoMAN. 
His Method with the Corrupt: HErRop. 
His Method with the Irresponsible: Mary oF Mac- 
| DALA. 
His Method with the Lost: ZACCHAEUS, 
His Method with the Cumbered: MartTHa, 
His Method with the Disciple: Mary oF BETHANY. 
His Method with the Sceptic: THOMAS. 
His Method with the Politician: PILATE. 
His Method with the Abandoned: Tue Dyince THIEF. 
His Method with the Zealot: SAUL OF TARSUS. 
Conclusion— Whosoever : You. 


MARBLE COLLEGIATE HOME EVENINGS 


For six weeks immediately preceding and including 
Holy Week, the plan for Wednesday evenings has for 
several years been as follows: 

At six o’clock the “ Family ” meets for supper and 
an hour of informal good fellowship, enjoyed by all 
who are able to attend. 

At seven o’clock the “ Family ” breaks up into 
groups for Bible Study, Mission Study, and direction 
in personal work. There is also a Catechetical class 
for the children. 


28 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


At eight o’clock the ‘‘ Family ” reunites for the regu- 
lar mid-week service. This closing hour is opened 
with an old-fashioned song, prayer and praise service. 
The minister in charge conducts a Question Box. 
Questions handed to him in writing are answered pub- 
licly or, should the question asked prove unsuitable for 
consideration in the service itself, the questioner is 
invariably given the privilege of a personal interview. 

A solo is followed by a twenty-minute address. The 
service is unfailingly concluded with a special prayer 
for those present who have a need for which they have 
requested special help. 

Following the mid-week hour, the personal workers 
frequently meet for conference and discussion. 

Quite aside from any immediate results which may 
be achieved by these Wednesday evening activities, an 
atmosphere of friendliness has been promoted and the 
evangelistic message has been given an emphasis, indi- 
rect but exceedingly important. It may not be amiss 
to suggest again that Atmosphere is always an impor- 
tant factor in Evangelism. 

The Wednesday evening subjects for one five- 
months’ period were: 


Sinking Ships and Shores of Safety. 

Open Gates to Greatness. 

Does It Matter What You Believe? 

“Lead, Kindly Light.” 

The Faith of President Coolidge.* 

Sorrow’s Way to the Summit.* 

Heaven’s Conservation Policy.* 

A Midnight Conversation.* 

Preparatory Service.* 

A Morning Walk in the Resurrection Garden.* 


* Subjects during Lent. 


THE CROSS ABOVE FIFTH AVENUE 29 


Enter God. 

The Shepherd of the Hills. 

What Does Jesus Christ Mean to You? 

Hiding Out. 

New Life in Great Thoughts. 

The Moral Quitter. 

Kingdom Building with the King. 

‘The Bow in the Clouds. 

The Man Who Gave More Than a Cup of Water. 
What Shall My Vacation Be? 


THE SUMMER CAMP 


Continuing the theme of ‘‘ Atmosphere,” the Marble 
Collegiate Summer Camp for Girls has become, with 
no unnatural effort and with an utter absence of 
mechanical stimulation, another great opportunity. 
Under the leadership of a resourceful and consecrated 
young woman, a beautiful summer home for girls has 
been established and equipped, on Schroon Lake, in 
the Adirondacks. In July and August young women 
come and spend their days and nights in a great 
bungalow, set among the pines, in spacious grounds, | 
where every physical comfort and mental need has 
been anticipated. Here bodies relax, minds are re- 
freshed and spirits are restored. 

Beginning with the first summer, the return of the 
girls to New York has always brought new life to the 
clubs and societies of the church and new members to 
the congregation. 

Social to Save is the title of a rather ancient 
book, but it makes a very good motto for a modern 
programme. 


THE SUNDAY EVENING INVITATION 
After the sermon address, “ Who Enters Canaan? ” 


30 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


which appears on page 70 of this volume, the follow- 
ing invitation was extended. A similar invitation in- 
variably closes the evening service: 

(A Stenographic Report) ‘‘ The sermon was con- 
cluded with a brief prayer and then the Gospel hymn, 
‘I Need Thee, Every Hour,” was sung as a solo. Dr. 
Poling at once came forward and said: 

‘Will you all bow your heads? ” 

“Tf there are any here who have burdens too great 
for them to bear alone—grief, business difficulties, 
family cares, or that greatest of all burdens, sin—we 
are eager to help you. Stand, or lift your hand, and 
you will be remembered in this brief prayer before 
the Benediction.”——“ God bless you, sir,—God bless 
you—and you—and you. God bless each one of you. 
I will be glad, so glad, to meet you here at the close 
of the service.” 

Another brief interval, then the following prayer 
and Benediction: 

‘“‘Our Father, we have prayed for all tonight, and 
now we pray especially for these. Thou knowest each 
one and Thou art able to do for each one beyond all 
our asking and all our thinking. Bestow the needed 
blessing; grant the needed grace; supply the lack. If 
it be sin, make the cry of the sinner honest and com- 
plete; if it be sorrow, Thou art the Comforter; if it be 
sickness, Thou art always passing by. O, generous, 
unfailing Father, let none of these go from this place 
unsatisfied or incomplete. We know what Thou hast 
done; we know what Thou canst do; we know Thou 
canst not fail. 

‘* And now may the grace of God Who hath called 
us into His eternal glory by Christ Jesus our Lord, be 
with you and abide forever. Amen.” 


IIT 


IT HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND 


HE young people are vitally a part of the evan- 
gelistic plans of the Marble Collegiate Church. 


This chapter seeks to visualise their activities 

in connection with one department of the programme. 
The scene of our story is located on Manhattan 
Island in the chapel of what is believed by many to 
be the oldest Protestant Church in North America. 
The evening is Sunday; the occasion is the weekly 
religious service of a Christian Endeavour Society that 
has an unbroken history of thirty-three years. One 
hundred and six young people were present—to be 
sure, a few are older than that—young people from all 
walks of life and from all quarters of New York. 
There are Columbia University students, music stu- 
dents, business women, clerks, traveling salesmen, at 
least one attorney, and a Y. M. C. A. Secretary or two. 
The leader is a young woman who makes an original 
presentation of the topic, “The Dangers of Trifling | 
with Life.’ She draws her illustrations from the city 
that weeps and laughs about her. At the right of the 
leader sits the President, who is the responsible head 
of an important department in a large store; also, he 
sings in an important choir. He has opened the meet- 
ing on time and now “ follows through” with the 
leader. A blackboard stands at the leader’s left. One 
of the young artists of the Society has sketched a 
picture that has the double merit of being both artistic 


31 


32 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


and illuminating. When the opportunity is given, the 
response from the floor is prompt and spirited. The 
singing carries the full swing of youth. A special solo 
contributes materially to the programme. Promptly at 
ten minutes before eight Mizpah is repeated and prac- 
tically all the Endeavourers “ transfer ” to the church 
auditorium. Here twenty or more of them are among 
the personal workers, assigned to special “‘ posts.” All 
make their eonibinen to the life of the aie? 
service. 

For ten minutes preceding the Christian Endeavour 
service just described, a number of the Endeavourers 
have been in prayer for the success of the meeting. 
Between six and seven o’clock there has been a social 
hour, when tea has been served, and the young men 
and women have gathered together about tables in the 
church parlour. Some of those present have traveled 
thirty miles to keep the appointment. The regular 
socials throughout the winter and picnics in the sum- 
mer are delightful affairs. 

More recently this Society has been divided. A 
Senior Society was organised from among those above 
thirty years of age who still desire the opportunities 
of an expressional meeting. More than thirty were 
enrolled as active members. It has been discovered 
that while the young people may have been deterred 
in some instances by those older and more mature, 
quite as frequently those older and more mature have 
remained away through fear of depriving the more 
youthful Endeavourers of their full opportunity. 
Now four Societies meet in this old down-town 
church every Sunday evening. The Juniors come at 
five o’clock; the Intermediates gather at five-thirty 
and the Young People’s and Senior Societies con- 


IT HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND 33 


vene in different auditoriums at the same hour—seven 
o’clock. 

The activities of the District and State Unions and 
the denominational programme are supported, under 
the leadership of special committees. The societies 
secure the subscriptions for denominational publica- 
tions and furnish visitors for the Every Member can- 
vass. In one of the Near East Golden Rule Sunday 
Campaigns it led the societies of the country in its 
contributions. Invariably it has large delegations, and 
often the “largest” delegation, at rallies and con- 
ferences. Its Sunday evening meetings for more than 
thirty years have never been discontinued for the 
summer vacation. The senior minister, Dr. David 
James Burrell, who has served the congregation since 
1891, declares that his pastorate, a pastorate of re- 
markable achievement, would have been difficult 
indeed, if not impossible, without Christian En- 
deavour, and the co-minister supports the declaration. 

There are some who labour under the impression 
that to make Christian Endeavour (and, of course, 
the principle applies to every other Young People’s 
organisation with the same general aims and plans) 
meet present day needs, it is necessary to depart from 
the spirit and plan of the Society as a denominational 
and inter-denominational movement. The intimation 
is that somehow the movement itself is responsible for 
a local society that does not appeal to young men and 
young women. 

Frequently the subject, ‘‘ What is the matter with 
Christian Endeavour? ” is raised and discussed,—and 
a good subject it is. Later, the regular Christian En- 
deavour topics may be abandoned because they 
‘presuppose a personal experience which they (the 


\ 


34 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Endeavourers) do not have.” New topics may be 
prepared, among others the following: “ A Single or 
Double Standard,” ‘‘ Things That Help and Hinder 
Our Town,” ‘ Prohibition,” “ Shall We Label Our- 
selves Christians or Not?” What is the result? New 
life and vigour, of course. Perhaps the Society gets 
out of the “clipping rut’ and there is a “clash of 
mind on mind ”’; “ convictions which are original and 
not borrowed ” follow. A new pledge, a new kind of 
topic and a new leadership, make a new Society. Plan- 
ning Sunday evenings once a month, with a musical 
programme and light refreshments, becomes popular. 
The group method of leadership, which is always new 
to those who have not used it, and which should be 
tried by many others, is seized upon as an innovation. 
But positively everything that such a Society does to 
break away from the formalism that crushed out its 
incentive and vital life, Christian Endeavour Societies 
have been and are doing. All of these ideas and plans, 
with hundreds of others, have arisen out of the experi- 
ence of the organisation given its beginning in the 
Williston Church, of Portland, Maine, by Francis 
BR. Clark. 

The writer has had nothing to do with the selection 
of Christian Endeavour topics, but, looking over the 
regular topics for the current year and comparing 
them with the “special” topics selected by several 
societies for their own use, he finds no new ground 
covered by the latter. He does discover that the 
widely representative character of the Topic Com- 
mittee of the Interdenominational Young People’s 
Commissions, which represents the Epworth League, 
the Baptist Young People’s Union and Luther 
League, as well as the Christian Endeavour, has 


IT HAPPENED ON AN ISLAND 35 


naturally achieved a series much more adaptable to 
the needs and characteristics—denominational and 
geographical—of our whole country and of the world. 
Of course, in every instance an individual young 
people’s society that is wide awake, does exactly what 
these other organisations have done,—adapts subjects 
to the needs of the particular community and church. 

As to the pledge, there has never been a time when 
a local church has not been encouraged to select the 
“covenant ” or “ declaration” it finds best suited to 
its own needs. It is true that the vast majority of the 
societies have found a measure of strength in uniform- 
ity, but many a pastor has written the ‘“ pledge” or 
“object ” his young people have finally selected. 

As a minister, and before that, as a Christian En- 
deavour Secretary and as a Christian Endeavourer in 
a college society, the writer has found Christian En- 
deavour adaptable; not only adaptable, but quickly 
responsive to the challenge of the new or unusual con- 
dition. We have Christian Endeavour in our church 
today, because it meets the need, meets the local need, 
meets the interdenominational need, meets—and meets 
magnificently—the world need, that need which waits 
on the finer and larger unity, without which the Chris- 
tian Church is so often shamed before her task. We 
are a down-town church, but our Intermediate Chris- 
tian Endeavour Society and our Junior Christian 
Endeavour Society, though small, are flourishing. 
Two of our Intermediates are preparing for the min- 
istry and one of our Endeavourers is now in a Theo- 
logical Seminary. In every instance the Christian 
Endeavour activities of the church correlate with the 
work of the clubs for women and girls and boys and 
with the classes in the Sunday School. They make for 


56 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


fulness of life and genuineness of social and spiritual 
expression. 

The President of the Official Board of our church 
received his training in a Christian Endeavour Society; 
another of the four elders was a former active Endeav- 
ourer, and one of the most influential members of the 
congregation has been President of the New York State 
Christian Endeavour Union. He was the Executive 
Chairman of the New York World’s Convention Com- 
mittee. The Church has such a lively appreciation of 
the interdenominational values of the organisation that 
the United Society of Christian Endeavour receives a 
contribution from its budget. 

The writer has no hesitation in referring to these 
things, for Christian Endeavour began in his church 
before he was old enough to join a Junior Society. 
That which he writes about he is in no sense re- 
sponsible for. 

Christian Endeavour is a tool, not an automatic 
machine. It may be used or abused. It may be mis- 
understood and abandoned, but many have found it, 
over a period of more than two generations, a tre- 
mendously effective instrument,—the most effective 
among many offered to the Church and her leadership, 
for bringing young people to Jesus Christ, for strength- 
ening and developing them in the Christian life, and 
for training them in the service of the Kingdom. 


IV 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 


that the evangelistic programme described here, 

though not at all limited to them, is very vitally 
for, and with young people. Perhaps a frank, however 
incomplete, facing of the ‘ problem of youth” will 
not be amiss. 

“TY would not be the father of children today. I 
would not assume any responsibility for bringing new 
lives into the world. I am afraid to be a father.” 
The speaker was a well-to-do, cultured Christian gen- 
tleman, and the husband in a childless home. He isa 
coward, of course—but what are the facts? 

If we are to believe much of our current literature, 
youth is almost unbelievably irresponsible and sophisti- 
cated, and, by all formerly-held standards, morally 
unrestrained. Current fiction is full of youthful heroes 
who talk like continental physiologists, and radiant 
heroines who are competent to give post-graduate 
courses to their nurses and mothers. A brilliant novel- 
ist, in a frank interview, declares that, “the average 
middle-class young folks are doing the things that used 
to be confined to millionaires.”” And one may add that 
what was formerly available to only those who had the 
checkbook and accompanying opportunities of the mil- 
lionaire, may now be procured at greatly reduced 
prices by any man’s son. 

Main Street and Broadway run into each other. 


37 


Prrtacinee chapters have emphasised the fact 


38 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


The Ford and the Rolls-Royce travel the same high- 
way. Skirts are as long or as short in Kalamazoo as 
they are in Manhattan. Fashion plates reach the 
Pacific within thirty-one hours after they are released 
on Fifth Avenue, and the radio is troubled as little by 
static in San Francisco as it is in Boston. 

What are the facts? Well, bobbed hair is one of 
them. Sermons are being preached with headdress and 
hair style as a theme. The cigarette is another fact. 
The medical director of the Life Extension Institute 
is authority for the statement that young women are 
particularly affected by the cigarette; that their death 
rate between the ages of 17 and 32 is considerably 
higher than that of their brothers; that if they do 
not stop smoking they will seriously impair the phys- 
ical efficiency of the race. The modern dance and 
juvenile bootlegging are yet other facts. The latest 
official report on dance halls and cabarets for New 
York City is enough to make parents run in terror to 
the desert. | 

Youth is accused of being common today; of wear- 
ing his sentiments loudly; of playing his juvenile game 
of love with a certain brazen affrontery. A great 
friend of adolescence asks, ‘‘ Were not young people 
richer, happier, when their associations were under an 
embarrassed restraint, when holding hands was not 
commonplace, and when a kiss was an event; when 
conversation did not have to be shocking to be interest- 
ing,’ and, one might add, when love stories were a suc- 
cess without being cluttered up with the paraphernalia 
of a maternity clinic? 

Certainly the times in which we live are full of men- 
ace for civilisation because of the perils surrounding 
and claiming youth. I wonder whether this may be 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 39 


the chief peril—that ‘‘ young people are apt to think 
themselves wise enough, just as drunken men think 
themselves sober enough.” 

But these that have been mentioned are not all the 
facts. All young people are not common—emphat- 
cally no—comparatively few are. I have seen dancing 
in hotel dining-rooms that made me feel like doing 
physical violence to some dancers, but with all the 
hotels and dance halls and cabarets of New York 
crowded, comparatively few of the young people of 
even this city are found there, and of these few, com- 
paratively few, are vicious. As a father, I have a per- 
fectly legitimate case against the evil picture on our 
screen, the evil play on our stage, the evil book and 
magazine on our news-stand. These things are poison 
in the spring of our home and social life. They pollute 
our soul. They foul us from within. They should be 
stopped. They should be destroyed. But youth has a 
wealth of fineness and courage that not even socially 
cultivated filth can cover. Normal youth has deep 
centers of resistance, hidden sources of power, and 
above this pestilential scum of screen and stage and 
social excess, our young men and our young women 
still see visions! 

It is my candid opinion that we get more—vastly 
more—from youth than we deserve; that the good 
holdings are far beyond the investment we make. 
Never did any civilisation have a soil as rich as ours 
in which to plant the seeds of religion, morality and 
patriotism. Never has any nation known a braver field 
in which to sow the promise of her destiny. 

Stop slandering youth! 

For all the bankers who are defaulters, there are 
thousands who remain faithful and honest. 


40 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


For all the husbands and for all the wives who break 
the vow of marriage there is a great company of virtu- 
ous fathers and mothers. 

For all the preachers who betray their trust, there 
are thousands who hold inviolate their vows. 

For all the young people who sell their birthright of 
health and chastity, there are hundreds of thousands 
who hold fast their virtue and their faith. Many 
others there are who, swept from their feet by a sudden 
tide of temptation, struggle back again to gain at last 
the guarded heights. All honor to them. By those of 
us who are older, let it be remembered that when we 
find ourselves out of sympathy with the young, then 
is our work in this world done. Bulwer Lytton once 
said: “ Every street has two sides. When two men 
shake hands and part, watch which of the two takes 
the sunny side. He will be the younger man of the 
two.” Watch the man who takes the sunny side of 
faith and hope, of sympathy and understanding, as he 
walks the crowded, maddening way of youth. He will 
be in all things the younger man. 

The facts concerning youth are many and highly 
involved, but one stands out above all the, others. 
Youth ts today more sinned against than sinning. 
“We criticise their hair, their skin, their shoes, their 
skirts and their manners. I suppose that when we 
were young, to hear some of us talk, we were gentle 
angels sitting around on horsehair sofas with piously 
folded hands! ” declares a wise Bishop. ‘“ We forget 
banged hair. We forget balloon skirts and bell sleeves 
that crowded quiet citizens into the street and blocked 
the entrances of public buildings. We look upon Yes, 
We Have No Bananas as a sign of degeneracy, but 
who was it—what generation, if you please,—that sang 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 41 


“Pharaoh's daughter on the bank, 
Little Moses in the pool; 
She fished him out with a telephone pole, 
And sent him off to school?” 


As between taking incidents of the Bible and making 
hilarious songs out of them, some of us prefer the Yes, 
We Have No Bananas of our children.” 


The writer has seen more than 20,000 young men 
and women in religious conferences and conventions 
within recent months. A finer, cleaner, more normal 
lot of young men and women no generation has ever 
produced. In my twenty years of experience with 
young people, an experience that has taken me into 
every state and province of North America, I have 
never faced such numbers of sterling youth. They are 
the most responsive people in the world. They answer 
more quickly to the invitations of high ideals and they 
respond more generously to the challenge of service 
and sacrifice than any other group. I have found them 
more sympathetic toward others and less sophisticated. 
In my work as a minister I have never known them to 
fail when appealed to on the plane of sincerity and 
honor. 


Years ago a young lad made himself generally ob- 
noxious to the officials and members of my congrega- 
tion. He capped the climax by shooting liquid snuff 
into the mid-week service room. We sounded more 
like a hay fever clinic than a prayer meeting, and 
hastily adjourned. Although the case was not com- 
plete, and the evidence entirely circumstantial, a coun- 
cil of war court-martialed the aforesaid youth—in his 
absence—and solemnly decided to hand him over to 


42 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the authorities for a trip to the Boys’ Reformatory. I 
asked for a chance with him first. My long-suffering 
officials generously consented. I met him alone. I 
accused him of nothing, but told him I was in deep 
trouble and that he was the only fellow in the world 
who could help me out. Well, he helped me! 

There is much more to the story, but its details are 
unimportant. He helped me out. That boy never 
again failed in any vital matter of deportment. He is 
a successful Ohio business man now. Our friendship 
has been strengthened by the years. It has helped me 
trust youth! 

But for the sad, the vicious things no man dare 
ignore, who are chiefly to blame? In a questionnaire 
sent to practically all Protestant clergymen, the follow- 
ing answer to this question was received. First of all, 
only twenty-five per cent. of those replying believed 
that young people were worse in this generation than 
in former generations; seventy-five per cent. declared 
them to be at least not worse; seventy-eight per cent. 
of all writers mentioned the bad example and lax dis- 
cipline of parents as a cause of present day unsatis- 
factory conditions, and twenty-eight per cent. listed the 
failure of parents, the moral delinquency of parents at 
this point, as chiefly, as primarily responsible. All but 
twenty-eight per cent. gave as the principal reasons for 
the failure of youth, the indifference and failure of 
mature men and women to discharge their obligation 
to youth. It has been said that to neglect youth is the 
greatest social sin. Then what a colossal failure our 
generation has been! A recent newspaper caption 
read, ‘‘ Doctors operate on lad’s head to make better 
boy of him.” That isn’t where our fathers operated 
to make better boys of us! The writer has no com- 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 43 


plaint and no regrets, but we twentieth century fathers 
must face the fact that discipline without example is 
disaster! 

Recently one of the great football men of the current 
university year, in summarising social conditions on 
the campus of his institution, said, ‘‘ Following the 
Washington Student Conference on Law Enforcement 
conducted by ‘ The Committee of One Thousand,’ my 
college made a ‘rightabout face.’ Student drinking 
became negligible. The fellow who encouraged it was 
quickly in disgrace. Fraternity, athletic and class 
leaders united for a thorough law enforcement pro- 
gram. But when the alumni came back for Com- 
mencement and for the social functions preceding 
Commencement, the campus went drunk again.” 
What an appalling indictment of the adult! 

Two young girls from a fashionable finishing school 
were talking with one of their more mature associates 
recently. Said one of them: “ Life isn’t worth much. 
Life isn’t worth living.” ‘The friend, a refined, Chris- 
tian woman, spoke in eagerness of ideals and visions, 
but received the startling answer, “ Yes, and our 
parents were that way once, but they aren’t any more.” 

A minister called to visit a mother in agony of sus- 
pense because of the tragedy that had come upon her 
daughter’s married life. He found a woman who, with 
her husband, had given her daughter an example of 
scandal and divorce. 

A boy of seventeen, who should be fresh and eager, 
in the full tide of his finest, his wildest ambitions, is 
sated with the tainted offerings society calls pleasure, 
withered in his heart and blasé! Who is to blame? 
Not the boy! 

Mr. Booth Tarkington asks: ‘“ Will you please tell 


44 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


me how a child can respect its parents after it has seen 
them turkey-trotting? ” And he continues: ‘“ The real 
blame for the present day wildness of young folks, 
rests with us—the older generation.”” And he con- 
cludes: ‘I am inclined to think that when our grand- 
children, our children’s children come, we may look for 
an improvement. Then fathers and mothers will begin 
to say—‘ Let’s don’t have them run the risks and get 
into the mischief that we did.’ They will have seen the 
disastrous results of their parents’ loose upbringing 
and then of their own.” At any rate, the change will 
come whenever parents become enough disgusted with 
themselves to set their hearts on working a decided 
improvement in themselves and in their offspring! 
And, remember, with adolescence the power of example 
is irresistible. 

What do we owe youth? With some difficulty I 
refrain from writing at length here of those funda- 
mental home influences the reader would naturally 
expect a religious leader to stress. Perhaps this very 
expectation has dulled the message. The writer could 
not have taken from his life the influence of the family 
altar and the old family pew in the church, without 
standing morally feeble, if not helpless, before his | 
temptations and tasks. The home today without these 
things, and all the associations that go with them, car- 
ries an appalling handicap in dealing with its sons and 
daughters. Now I have written it after all! 

I repeat—What do we owe youth? First of all— 
our time. What is Wall Street, or bridge, when com- 
pared with the baby who reaches out two chubby hands 
to hold you longer? What are ten operas, or a dozen 
social afternoons worth, if purchased at the expense of 
a lonely little girl or a heart-hungry little boy? A little 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 45 


while ago a dainty miss stood cautiously, diffidently at 
my chamber door and said, ‘“‘ When will you have time 
to play?”’ Do you remember the frantic father in 
Channing Pollock’s The Fool, the father who had never 
known his little girl, and who awoke one morning to 
find that he never would know her, because she was 
dead? There was some excuse for that father. The 
old fourteen-hour day, and the twenty-four hour shift, 
and seven-day week are wicked things, for they make 
fathers strangers to their children. But there is an- 
other menace worse than these—the menace of the 
twenty-four-hour day; the twenty-four-hour day for 
fathers and mothers; the twenty-four-hour day that 
substitutes nurses and butlers for parents, and robs 
the cradle of the hand that moves the world. 

We owe youth our comradeship—our understanding 
comradeship. The father who is not the pal of his son 
may be a millionaire, but he is a pauper and to be 
pitied. He may win a fortune, but he has already lost 
his pearl of great price. Parents must help each other. 
A mother must not spare herself to help a father to 
understand and to be understood, and a father must 
do not less for the mother of his children. Eternal 
issues are at stake. The weal or the woe of the nations 
are involved, and the future of the Kingdom of God 
on earth. 

Years ago I came to my study from a long journey 
and discovered that I had been preceded; that my 
small son had been there ahead of me. He had shoved 
my books into the recesses of the shelves; he had dis- 
covered my editorial scissors and had trimmed the 
edges of my manuscripts; he had written on a wall with 
vigour, if not with distinction; he had made it a day 
by overturning my inkwell. His mother found him 


46 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


there and promised him that I would find him later. 
And I did. He was full of words—a baby’s eager, 
frightened chatter—but I was full of wrath. Some of 
us still hold that there is ample ground for believing 
that Solomon was right. I did not spoil my son that 
day by forgetting my Solomon. But when the storm 
had somewhat abated, the sobbing fellow told me— 
made it perfectly plain, though no one else could have 
understood him—that J was wrong. 

He knew nothing about physiology, but he did know 
that I was away and that he was lonely, and so he 
went to the place where I was generally to be found 
when at home. He touched my books and thought of 
me. He stroked my papers and thought of me. He 
wielded my pen and thought of me. Hungry for me, 
he sought, not knowing why nor how, unconscious of 
all the weighty science involved—he sought to identify 
himself with my task, his father’s task, and I thrashed 
him for it. Because my comradeship was not as true 
as his; because I did not understand, I punished him. 

But let the last word be the most vital one. Give 
Youth your confidence. They will not betray your 
confidence and they will begin to have it in themselves. 
They will begin to have confidence in you! I knew a 
red-haired village terror who had destroyed the order 
of a school room, but who was won and changed by 
being given the responsibility for the peace and deport- 
ment of a dozen other boys. Give your confidence to 
youth! Let them know it! Give to them the dignity 
of that knowledge—and the restraint. 

In 1861 a staff-officer called a young orderly and 
entrusted him with a dangerous mission. And when 
the lad prepared to retire, in response to the final in- 
structions of his superior, he said, “‘ 7 will do my best, 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! AT 


Sir.” Like a bugle rang the officer’s reply, “ You will 
do it,’—-and he did. 

“The destiny of any nation at any time depends 
upon the opinions of its young men under twenty-five,” 
wrote Goethe. Another has said that in youth we 
learn, and in age we understand. ‘This is the balance 
that life keeps between the mortal seasons. ‘‘ Old men 
for counsel, young men for war,” is the other way of 
saying it. But certainly where there is failure, youth 
is not more often to blame. It is the writer’s observa- 
tion that, as a rule, in any engagement, the fighting is 
better done than the planning. 

Give Youth your confidence! They have earned it. 
In all strenuous places of work and thought Youth is 
in command. In the exceptional places will be found 
those men and women whose hearts are young, and 
who still see visions. 

I saw an engineer run his line across a spur of the 
Coast mountains. He was captain of the advance 
guard that blazed the way for the great Pacific Boule- 
vard which stands now in cement and granite from 
Canada to Mexico. He was 26 when he completed 
the assignment. 

I saw a healthful water supply replace the stagnant, 
disease-laden pools of Brest, in 1918. An old high 
school chum of mine had charge of that assignment. 

I watched twelve thousand men move in toward 
Toul and on to the first salient taken over by an 
American Combat Division, in January, 1918—twelve 
thousand men, did I-say? Twelve thousand men and 
boys, I should say, and, if years be the criterion, make 
the record read for all the wars—boys. 

As I write, I seem to hear a clear voice speaking 
beside an old haystack near Williams College. A 


48 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


clear voice, indeed, for after a century it still may be 
heard. Far carrying, it rings around the world. 
Those first student volunteers for modern missions 
were college lads, under-graduates. And the company 
whose spiritual challenge they became, whose torch 
they lighted, is an army of youth, an army, tens of 
thousands strong; young men and young women who 
have compassed the earth, laying down the foundation 
of churches and schools, raising up the walls of hos- 
pitals, teaching brotherhood, revealing the Galilzean’s 
way of life, proclaiming the Gospel, bringing to those 
who sit in darkness the marvelous light and liberty of 
the Sons of God. 

The most sublime program ever given to man came 
from a Teacher of thirty who completed His earthly 
ministry in three years, and who called as companions 
and helpers a dozen humble youths, every one of whom 
was younger than Himself. 

Some years ago, in fingering through the documents 
and letters belonging to a woman of whose humble 
estate I was the administrator, I came upon letters— 
letters yellow and brittle with age. Written in the 
stern days of the Civil War, they revealed the tragedy 
of a divided family. A son had broken his parent’s 
hearts by espousing the cause of the Union and by 
championing the freedom of the slave. His dearest 
sister was writing to him—seeking to change him from 
his wayward course. Again and again the flame of his 
ideal leaped up from those silent pages. He spoke of 
Lincoln—called him the greatest prophet since Isaiah, 
and the greatest patriot since Washington. Then how 
grandly he concluded—“ Yes, I can break your hearts, 
for in breaking yours I break my own, but I cannot sell 
my soul, not even for your love.” Forever it is true— 


STOP SLANDERING YOUTH! 49 


that Youth takes the best of the past, breaks with the 
worst, and eternally goes forward. 

Give Youth your confidence. Trust Youth to act 
with greater wisdom than his years as with greater 
promptness than his fears. 

Trust Youth to be progressive—to be progressive 
always; but given any fit leadership at all, any reason- 
able parental example and comradeship, trust Youth 
to reverence ancient, worthy, holy things. In each 
generation is made clear, and in no generation more 
unmistakably clear than in this, the purpose of 
young women and young men to serve their day and 
generation at any cost to themselves. To serve with 
consecration and abandon, but to serve soundly, as 
those who stand upon the highest places of moral and 
Spiritual discovery, crying to all the winds that blow— 
‘““'We believe! Make way for truth! ” 

Another name for Youth is Faith. 


1+ 
Deen 
yak oy 
Rl a 
s 





II 


SERMON-ADDRESSES 





¥ 
THREE ROADS TO POWER 


VERY normal man, every normal woman, 
H, covets power. Not power for power’s sake, 
but power for what it secures—power because 
power brings prestige and respect, gives position and 
assures success. There may be a few who are satisfied 
with power itself—the mere consciousness of it, the 
knowledge that it is available. There are some others 
who deliberately practise its abuse, who exercise it 
selfishly, viciously, who with forethought employ it to 
hurt others. But in the large, Society is made up of 
average men and women who in their thinking associ- 
ate power with success, and who, desiring success as 
the supreme end of life, covet power as the sure 
road to it. 

I say that average men and women—normal men 
and women—look upon success as the supreme end of 
life. Surely this is true. The instinct for victory is 
the great instinct. Our definitions of success vary; 
vary widely. Our ideals and standards, our environ- 
ments, our moral shortcomings, our strength and our 
weakness,—these all enter into our definitions. But 
what we conceive to be success, whatever that concep- 
tion, is the goal upon which our eyes are set and our 
hearts fixed. To the missionary, success is a tribe 
evangelised, a dark continent Christianised; to a ban- 
dit, success is a fruitful robbery completed without a 
prison sequel, Both missionary and bandit covet 


33 


54 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


power to achieve. To one man success is a fortune; 
to another success is pleasure—the joys of this world; 
to yet another success is fame. And yet some there 
are who surrender wealth and pleasure and earthly 
station to embrace a life of self-abnegation, to bury 
themselves with sacrifice and dangers in physical pov- 
erty, and all this to find their highest triumph. But it 
it for success that each man strives, and power to 
achieve it each man covets. 

These success standards are not only different, but 
in each individual each standard is subject to change. 
The babe shrieks with the delight of accomplishment 
when for the first time he bangs his rattle on the floor. 
But, tomorrow, success with him is something more. 
I well remember when success to me was selling fifteen 
papers in the morning. The newsboy’s standard for 
success may enlarge until from rejoicing in an average 
morning sale, he is satisfied with nothing less than the 
control and ownership of the publication. 

The writer is of the opinion that the majority of 
men and women are not committed in their lives to a 
selfish, personal success standard. I do not believe 
that many men and women think of success as some- 
thing to be achieved at the expense of others, nor do I 
believe that many deliberately claim success as some- 
thing for themselves alone. I have faith that average 
men and women generally think of success as being 
the victory of what they conceive to be the right, and 
that in a test they are ready to offer their lives for the 
right as they know it. 

But I know, too, that average men and women are 
not always clear in their own minds as to how success 
is to. be won. I know that some apparently estimable 
people practice what you and I hold is a sophistry— 


THREE ROADS TO POWER 55 


namely, “the end justifies the means.” These would 
insist that a holy cause sanctifies any lie told in its 
defence, purifies any wrong committed on its behalf. 
Here we come face to face with three major methods 
of victory. 

First, the method of force, the power of violence. 
Many there are who argue that inevitably the final ap- 
peal is to physical, material strength; that for nations, 
armed conflict is forever the end of a dispute, and that 
for individuals the same principle holds. With these, 
ruthlessness becomes a religion. They say when the 
mob gathers: “‘ Use the stick and at once; do not argue, 
and do not wait.”’ For such, all attempts to reconcile 
international differences, to adjust racial antipathies, to 
arbitrate the opposing claims and the economic dis- 
putes of nations, is a waste of time and a sign of weak- 
ness. These have no use for disarmament conferences 
and associations of nations. Weakness is the sin of the 
weak, and the God-given opportunity of the strong. 

Apply the principle in the world of public affairs, 
and we have wars, the raising up of super-powers to 
brush aside or trample under foot the little countries 
until at last in some great cataclysm, the balance is 
restored and the mad race in armaments begins all 
over again. Or some autocrat usurps the throne, be- 
heads the influential foes, proclaims himself the heir of 
Divine right and maintains his seat until the stronger 
force unseats him. Or men in positions of trust con- 
spire against those who have raised them from obscur- 
ity, exploit the public domain and turn to private uses 
the common treasure. They regard their power, how- 
ever they may have come by it, as force to be used for 
personal ends. They look upon the opportunity to 
increase their own gains as an invitation from Heaven. 


56 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


In business, the application of the principle justifies 
the destruction of competitors by any known sharp 
practice. The bankruptcy of a rival is cause for sing- 
ing the Doxology. One of the favourite mottoes of 
those who go this way is: ‘‘ In trade mercy is a folly. 
Do unto others as you think others would do unto you, 
and do it first! ” DoI believe that many men practise 
this principle? Certainly I donot. I have known only 
a very limited number who ever did. That the number 
is increasingly small, I am persuaded. But there ts a 
temptation here for every man. The Golden Rule is 
not an easy measurement. 

In religion the application of the principle of force 
took in ancient times the form of social and physical 
persecution, nor did the iron heel and the rack seem to 
be the exclusive property of any one sect. There were 
isolated killings, local torture devices, and there were 
national massacres. New nations with their untortured 
peoples were saved from spiritual damnation by their 
conquerors who marched under holy flags, baptising 
them with water in the name of the Trinity before they 
decapitated them in the name of the King. 

In our time the same principle expresses itself in the 
determined effort on the part of a few to drive out of 
the church those who do not subscribe to a particular 
interpretation of Scripture or doctrine, and to coerce 
men and women into intellectual conformity with cer- 
tain definitions of spiritual experience. Surely, here, 
the will and method of Jesus are clear. ‘‘ Let both 
grow together,” He said, “‘ until the harvest, and in the 
time of harvest I will say to the reapers, gather ye first 
the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but 
gather the wheat into my barn.” And you will recall 
that Jesus gave as the sufficient reason for such a 


THREE ROADS TO POWER 57 


policy of delay and mildness—“ Lest while ye gather 
up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” 

This first method, the force method, must be dis- 
avowed by those who set their faces steadfastly toward 
success, only as it becomes the principle of discipline 
in the higher law—the infinitely higher law of truth. 

Truth is the second major method of victory. ‘“ Ye 
shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” 
Force becomes a brutal pygmy when measured by the 
stature and power of truth. Force perishes in its own 
blood, falls into its own grave of persecution, but truth 
marches on with the conquered unshackled and fol- 
lowing loyally in its train. 

Truth reasons, and has presently a supporting army. 
Force crushes, and starves eventually in an impover- 
ished country. The proponents of truth as the 
supreme method of victory insist that men may be 
trusted, may always be trusted to accept truth when 
truth is made clear. But there are some who are 
equally insistent that truth in a crisis must have force 
behind it; that talking with an erring friend when you 
have the ability and opportunity to knock him down 
and drag him out is feeble and pusillanimous. They 
are on what they hold as principle against frittering 
time away in peace councils. 

A little while ago the President of France, M. Gaston 
Doumergue, visited his old friends and neighbours in 
the ancient Huguenot City of Mines, and said to them 
in an informal way some things about peace and 
tolerance that may be applied with equal force to both 
religion and politics. ‘‘ Long experience,” he declared, 
“has taught me that ideas never gain ground by being 
either spread or defended with violence. Violence adds 
nothing to their virtue, where they have any, and it 


58 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


serves only to hide their appeal, to prevent their dif- 
fusion, and even to make them highly objectionable. 
Ideas which have need of violence to attain diffusion 
and become accepted, never lead to happiness, liberty 
or lasting peace, and they never produce a very high 
or a very human civilisation.” 

Truth has in herself irresistible tides of life—hidden 
springs of immortal power. Enemies cannot long hide 
her, nor can they ever destroy her, but unwise and 
violent friends have often greatly delayed her. 

The third major method of success is the method of 
Jesus. The final, the ultimate method, is neither force 
nor truth alone. ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise 
again; but there is an Omnipotence that lifts her and 
that Omnipotence is love. ‘“‘ Love so amazing—Love 
so divine.” 


“Ask not of me what is Love, 
Ask what is good of God above. 
Ask of the great sun what is light, 
Ask what is darkness of the night. 
Ask sin of what may be forgiven, 
Ask what ts happiness of Heaven.” 


“ Love is the river of life in this world,’ Beecher said. 
“Think not that ye know it who stand at the little 
tinkling rill_—the first small fountain. Not until you 
have gone through the rocky gorges and not lost the 
stream; not until you have traversed the meadow, and 
the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could 
ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you 
have come to the unfathomable ocean and poured 
your treasures into its depths;—not until then can 
you know what love is.” All of woman’s tenderness 


THREE ROADS TO POWER 59 


and all of man’s justice, love is, and all of God, for 
God is love! 

Have you ever before faced the fact that with these 
three major methods to choose from—force, truth and 
love, the Galilzan selected the latter. ‘ All power is 
given unto me in heaven and in earth,” He declared. 
Even Satan bore witness to that truth and tempted 
Jesus accordingly. Omnipotence was his. High 
priests, blood-hungry. mobs, Roman soldiers and 
pretors of the Cesars, were all potential pygmies in 
His hands. But they survived while He accepted the 
death they imposed, because He suffered them to live. 
The hands that lifted bread and fish, the will that 
multiplied fragments of food until a hungry multitude 
was satisfied, could have raised vast armies with equal 
ease and promptness. Calvary may have been a 
Roman holiday by right of Roman arms, but it is the 
world’s Holy Day because of the omnipotence of the 
love that changed it from a slave’s cross to a Saviour’s 
crown. 

Has it ever occurred to you that with three methods 
—force, truth and love—to choose from, Jesus selected 
love because love was the mightiest? He came to 
rescue a race, to redeem man. Equipped with utter 
wisdom and utmost power, He surveyed the task, ap- 
praised His enemies, spent thirty years in preparation 
for His ordeal, and then made His finish fight, having 
selected love as the one and only method to save a 
world. Doing so, He broke with tradition. He caused 
enemies to laugh with derision, and followers to turn 
away in disappointment. He surrendered an immedi- 
ate, tangible crown for a spiritual kingdom beholden 
only by a few far-eyed dreamers. But He won! He 
accomplished that whereunto He was sent. He saved 


60 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the world. By the test of results, by the standard of 
success, His selection is confirmed, His method is 
vindicated. 

Herod the adulterer—puppet king by sufferance of 
imperial power—had his day, but its sun went down 
into a starless night, and even so, its last rays lingered 
over a hill of execution where a naked man hung dead 
upon his cross. Pilate, creature of the mightiest 
ancient empire ever raised upon spearpoints, invoked 
force to accomplish his half will and fearing force more 
than truth, knowing naught of a greater, damned his 
soul to please his King. 

Those who search for the kingdoms of wisdom dig 
among ruins, those who trace the paths of temporal 
empires follow a way bordered by tombs, but the One 
whom Herod mocked and Pilate crucified, Calvary’s 
victim of force, still lives and reigns “ where’er the 
sun does his successive courses run.” 

But certainly Jesus did not spurn the way of truth. 
“My word is truth,” He declared. His wisdom sur- 
passed that of the wisest. At twelve He was confound- 
ing the Temple doctors. His words remain. His 
teachings survive. His social standards and moral 
ideals, His program for human relationships stand 
unchallenged today in the last court of humanity’s 
appeal. Ah, no, Jesus did not spurn, did not ignore 
the way of truth, but He made truth dynamic. He 
glorified it—glorified and perfected it with love. He 
gave it an immortal soul, made it divine, omnipotent. 

Love was the final method of Jesus because love 
alone is omnipotent. Both force and truth have their 
place—force in certain desperate, immediate situ- 
ations, and truth is royal under all conditions. But 
love it is that makes force discipline and not reprisal. 


THREE ROADS TO POWER 61 


Love it is that makes wisdom a means and not an end, 
a minister instead of a master, and love it is that sets 
truth on fire;—Love of country, love of fellowman, 
love of those loved dearer yet than life itself, and 
love of God. 

Force could inflict taxation without representation 
as a principle of despotic government, but force could 
not enforce it for the spirit of ’76 would not consent. 
Force could deny the early Christian the right to wor- 
ship in public places and private houses, but force 
could not keep them from the Catacombs, the bloody 
sands of the Colosseum and the flaming stake and so 
the Rome of Nero burned and not the Church of Paul. 
And today, where Democracy prevails, where Chris- 
tianity masters, the method of victory is love. 

President Watson, of the American University at 
Cairo, wrote, ‘“‘ The only force that will avail to win 
the Moslem is love. I used to think that the greatest 
power in the world was truth, but truth alone cannot 
win the Moslem. ‘There is something mightier than 
truth, especially for Moslem lands and lives. It is 
love. If we would win, we must love.” 

What a restatement of our text. ‘‘ If we would win, 
we must love.” “ He loved them unto the end.” The 
method of Jesus was love because of love’s supreme 
conquering power. For Israel or Greece or Rome, 
Moslem or Gentile or Jew, love is the supreme con- 
quering power. Love conquers, too, because love sur- 
vives. The books of wisdom fade and crumble, 
accepted truths become outgrown traditions, the spears 
of power rust and break, but Love lasts! And Love 
stands alone in being stronger at the end than at the 
beginning. 

Who, who, then, will follow in His train? 


VI 
THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 


y \HE Pharisee’s thanksgiving prayer is the classic 
of its kind. ‘“ God, I thank Thee that I am not 
as other men are,” is the perfect expression of 

deliberate isolation. Deliberate isolation is for an in- 

dividual, or a nation, the last end of selfishness. Jesus 
with His perfection of concise style has here com- 
pressed into twelve words the classical illustration 
from the Talmud. When Rabbi Nechonina Ben 

Hakana left his school he was wont to say, “I thank 

Thee, O Eternal my God, for having given me part 

with those who attend this school instead of running 

through the shops. I rise early like them, but it is to 
study the law, not for futile ends. I take trouble as 
they do, but I shall be rewarded and they will not. 

We run alike, but I for the future life, while they will 

only arrive at the pit of destruction.” 

We are not inclined to remind ourselves at any 
length of the disapproval that the Great Master ex- 
pressed for the Pharisee. But the Pharisee failed in 
two directions. His gratitude was not only for what 
he imagined himself to be—it was also for what he was 
sure the publican was not and could not become. Here 
is the curse of deliberate isolation. Men so centre in 
what they have, or think they have, that their concern 
for the less fortunate is dissipated in pride and selfish- 
ness. True gratitude is mixed with humility and hu- 
mility has in it the essence of responsibility. He who 


62 


THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 63 


is truly thankful for the good gifts he possesses, in- 
stinctively turns to share them. 

Have you ever tried to compose a proper prayer for 
that Pharisee of Scripture? Perhaps it should have 
been something like this: ‘“ God, I thank Thee that we 
sinners have Thy mercy in our hands, and that all men 
may be as we are ’—and should have been offered with 
the Pharisee’s arm thrown over the shoulder of the 
publican. 

Perhaps it is not amiss to remind ourselves on this 
Thanksgiving Day that as a people we must guard 
against a Pharisaical Thanksgiving—a national holi- 
day of self praise. We see the faces of the Near East 
orphans as those helpless children flash across the 
screen. We hear the sabre rattle in the far Sudan. 
We read of breadlines in Manchester and visualise the 
utter political chaos of China. We look, then, to our 
own peaceful fields and bursting harvests. We cut our : 
coupons and count the gains from rising markets. We 
thank God that the Government at Washington still 
survives and almost before we know it, we are thanking 
Him with the implications of the Pharisee that ‘“ we 
are not as others are.” 

But in a more vital way America must avoid the 
snare of isolation, the pride of selfishness. Our people 
return from Europe and with scarcely a dissenting 
voice say, ‘‘ Thank God that I am an American,” and 


“ Breathes there a man with soul so dead, 
Who never to himself hath sasd, 
This is my own, my native land? 
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, 
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d 
From wandering on a foreign strand?” 


64 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Love of country, next to love of God and love of 
God’s way, is the most beautiful, the most sublime 
experience of the human soul. Patriotism—true pa- 
triotism—is an international sentiment, but it begins at 
home. It has at its heart that profound principle 
which Jesus recognised when He said: ‘ Go ye into all 
the world—beginning at Jerusalem.”’ 

Frankly, I am as-suspicious of the man who boasts 
of an internationalism that makes no distinctions, as I 
am of a husband who confesses a love of womankind 
that does not begin first and remain last with the wife 
of his covenant, the mother of his children. Thank 
God that you are an American, then, but God pity us 
when we thank God that we are not as other people— 
even these Chinamen, or Italians, or Armenians, or 
Germans, or French, or Russians, or British. 

Our national Thanksgiving prayer, in order to pass 
inspection at the throne of the only monarch who does 
not tremble for His crown must be: “ Thank God, for 
man’s common heritage of opportunity. Thank God 
that in the Divine Purpose all men are created free and 
equal.” And that prayer must be offered with hands 
stretched out across the seas. Our national thanks- 
giving will be the finest experience of our history if we 
make it the opening number of an international service 
that concludes with a Congressional World Court 
Doxology. Less than this will leave us standing peril- 
ously close to the self-satisfied individual of whom 
the wisest, kindliest Teacher this world ever knew 
said: ‘‘ For every one that exalteth himself shall be 
abased.”’ 

But always we are chiefly concerned with the per- 
sonal appeal of Thanksgiving Day. We gather as men 
and women, as fathers and mothers, sons and daugh- 


THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 65 


ters. Presently we shall dine as such, and then perhaps 
—TI wish that all might hope for so happy an event— 
we shall meet the laughter of our children and the 
music of our friends in a room where joy and love are 
the makers of delight. 

What shall we be thankful for? Of course, for the 
majority of us some things are at once eliminated. 
The failure of the Pharisee does not tempt the poor 
man at the point of wealth. Many of us will not thank 
God for great temporal possessions because we cannot 
—we do not have them. There is no virtue in our 
restraint! Some of us are even willing to admit that a 
certain wise discrimination in the distribution of riches, 
has at least relieved us of their temptation. A strong 
man it is who is master of his treasure—unspoiled, un- 
selfish, happy in his prosperity. 

But what shall I thank God for, and avoid the 
temptation of the Pharisee’s thanksgiving? Ah, I will 
thank Him for the common things—the common, rich- 
est things. I will thank Him that I see and hear and 
talk and walk. I will thank Him for my children—for 
my home. I will thank Him for my friends and for my 
work. I will thank Him for my country. I will thank 
Him for Jesus Christ! Surely here I stand apart from 
the loud-voiced Pharisee. 

But yesterday I saw my neighbour turn his face into 
the sun to feel the glory that he never more would see; 
and there are those who cannot hear the voices of their 
loved ones, and there are palsied throats that never will 
be filled with song, and only half a block away are 
little feet that hang from lifeless limbs. I stood today, 
stood with the thrill of life in my limbs and hands and 
with the never ceasing trumpet of this city in my ears 
and watched the sunlight play upon New Jersey bat- 


66 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


tlements of steel and stone. I cried, ‘‘ Thank God I 
feel, I see, I hear, I understand! ” And then I thought 
of those others in the shadow and the silence and my 
gratitude was not the less because I turned to count my 
other blessings. 

My children came, came in the flesh to greet me and 
their mother stood beside me. I saw them in their 
health and joy. I felt them in my deepest soul and 
memory brought the loved ones from far climes. We 
spread our board for all. I breathed a silent prayer 
of gratitude that had no sigh of vain regret. But in 
my neighbour’s house the servants spoke in whispers 
and moved softly by a guarded room where flowers 
wreathed a placid brow. 

I thank God today for all the gifts, for gifts they 
are—I have not earned them. But this full-toned 
Pharisee has made me search for something common to 
us all. I have my work and you have yours—the toil 
that commands us, the ministry that glorifies an ex- 
istence into a life. Thank God for work today! But 
tramping down the streets of our social order are men 
and women with hands and minds and hearts empty 
of tasks—the vast social army of the unemployed, and 
that equally sad spectacle of lives misfitted or wasted 
in the economic plan. As more and more I am coming 
to think of all human relationships in terms of the 
teachings of One who went about doing good; as in- 
creasingly I am finding myself challenged by His last 
and great commandment—“ Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thy- 
self ”—and as the supreme lesson of history, ‘‘ Without 
me ye can do nothing,” unrolls against the sky of 
human experience, and as I feel in my heart that love 
of God which passeth knowledge, I sink upon the altar 


THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 67 


of our Christian faith to whisper, ‘“ Thank God for 
Jesus Christ.” 

Oh, if He were unchained today! If we would but 
set Him free! Then every woman and every man and 
every child could lift that prayer as the hymn of the 
ages—knowing that ignorance and suspicion, selfish- 
ness, intolerance, lust, and all destroying hatreds would 
quickly fade from the ways of men. As it is, our grati- 
- tude must be modulated to the fact that vast areas of 
our life are still ugly in form and pagan in practice. 
Thank God for Jesus Christ—our only Saviour. 
Thank God for Jesus Christ—our only Captain to a 
better order, and our only hope of glory. But in a 
world that peels its thin veneer to show again its heart 
of greed; in a broken war-swept world—a world that 
after nineteen hundred years still has its heathen lands 
and heathen institutions in the so-called Christian 
states—let every man of us who follow in His train, 
but who follow Him afar, take care that we do not 
come to prayer beside the Pharisee. 

What, then, shall be my Thanksgiving prayer? 
What is the gift possessed by all, the gift to no man 
denied—the gift offered in its final distribution in 
equal portions to the least and to the greatest? This 
gift is life. I thank God for life. Life in the narrow 
street and high loft room—life in dark cellars growing 
toward the light. For it is life, and life is growth. 
Gamins of the street have become princes in the state. 
Crippled boys have dropped crutches and taken the 
wings of song. The blind have seen Paradise regained. 
The bereft have taught others the ministry of their 
pain, and poverty has been the seedground of greatness. 

I shall thank God for Life today—for Life belongs 
to all—to the young man who sees visions and to the 


68 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


old man who dreams dreams. For all of life let us be 
grateful—for the bitter and the sweet, the better and 
the worse—for life in sickness and in health, in pros- 
perity and in adversity. Here no Pharisee has ever 
stood to pray, and here no publican has ever prayed 
alone. | 

Thank God for the challenge of life—for its infinite 
“T must,” for the Divine urge that sends the Alpine 
daisy through frozen sod to meet the kisses of the sun, 
or thrusts a black boy up from slavery to be the 
Moses of his race. Thank God for that immortal 
declaration of independence of the unconquerable 
spirit. I have seen it in every circumstance and en- 
vironment of society. 3 

A little while ago I watched it play upon the faces 
of Czechoslovakians hurrying through Ellis Island. 
It spoke to me when a Russian immigrant, who had 
not waited to be naturalised before joining the colours 
and crossing to France, came to my study—with 
mustard-scarred lungs and a shrapnel-mangled hand— 
asking for work, but refusing, absolutely refusing, 
money. It is the heritage alike of desert and city, of 
business and of profession. The man of affairs . 
tumbled from his high business estate by some finan- 
cial earthquake and struggling back again has it. The 
widow baking loaves and selling bread to keep her 
children from an institution has it. It is the unfailing 
yeast that lifts society from barbarism to civilisation 
and that raises men from dust to divinity. Thank God 
for life! 

Yes, but you say, be true to your principle. Life, 
too, is at last a losing venture and Life for some is but 
a living death. No, thank God, no. Life is for all. 
And life is for all, fulfilment. Those who do not have 


THE PHARISEE’S THANKSGIVING 69 


it, whatever their estate, are those who have not 
claimed it. This which we call life is but life’s small 
beginning; the morning of its destiny; the childhood 
of its immortality. Crutches and blindness and sor- 
row, disillusionment and defeat, are but incidents. All 
misfortune and tragedy are as tears that follow 
laughter into the forgetfulness of infancy. Thank 
God for life—there is no death! 


“T tell you they have not died, 
Thewr hands clasp yours and mine. 
They are but glorified— 
They have become divine. 
They live! They know! They see! 
They shout with every breath— 
“Life ts eternity! 
There is no death!’” 


VII 
“WHO ENTERS CANAAN? ” 


A ee Canaan of our message is not a country 
hemmed by mountains or laved by seas; not 
a storehouse of physical provisions to be made 
the prize of conquest by arms. Our Canaan is a new 
Kingdom of time, a fair land of promise flowing for us 
all with the milk and honey of opportunity. Our 
Canaan is a new year! Who enters! 

We all enter! all who have lived out the last breath 
of the old year; the weak with the strong; the: old with 
the young. Some have scarcely survived the crossing 
and will hardly reach the first camping site, and they 
will surely fail before the first walled city falls, while 
others are so frail with youth that a mother’s eager 
arms have lifted them across; and the warrior who 
breasts the ford with scant attention to its obstacles 
and rushes on to take the frowning stronghold. But 
all are here. Grey head and black, trembling hand and 
steady; all are here at the beginning of the new and 
the ending of the old. 

Who enters Canaan? You who come with your 
good purposes and new resolutions. I am sure that 
many a man declared a few hours ago against certain 
of his unworthy practices; lifted his hand to high 
heaven and announced that he renounced them all. 
And I am as sure that no man among us was able to 
feel as he opened his eyes this morning that he had no 
room to improve, no chance to do better. The speaker 


70 


WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 71 


has never yet entered upon a new cycle of time without 
declaring in a deep and solemn earnest that he would 
be a truer, a better man. Before this service closes he 
hopes to see the demonstration of the fact that we are 
not blind to our shortcomings, nor deaf to a gracious 
invitation. 

Who enters Canaan? The lad who remembers the 
hours he has idled away, the lessons he slighted and 
the failure he registered at the close of the term. This 
lad enters the Canaan where he may regain his lost 
standing by the stern discipline of application and 
study. I think that it is an open question whether all 
young people should be given a college education. 
You noticed, I am sure, that I said “‘ given ” a college 
education. Certainly no young person should be de- 
prived of the chance for such an education. But I am 
constantly facing the fact that many young people are 
not at all benefited by their experience in the finishing 
school and university. Too frequently in these days 
the Fraternity and the Sorority, competitive athletics 
and constant social diversions, are the majors of the 
course. I pity any man who goes to any institution of 
higher learning without the necessity of somehow earn- 
ing at least a portion of his way. Young people enter- 
ing this Canaan, to penetrate the deepest cloisters of 
sound learning and broad, satisfying, ministering cul- 
ture, you must face the fact that there is no virtue 
without labor. You must accept the discipline of 
hard work. 

And the Church of Jesus Christ has entered Canaan. 
A new year of privilege is hers. She leaves behind,— 
she must leave it behind—-a wilderness of controversy 
and missionary retrenchment. At home and abroad 
fields have been weakened and even surrendered. 


72 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Mighty debts have all but overwhelmed some of the 
greater Church Boards, and the numerically smaller 
denominations have been inclined to congratulate 
themselves where they have done no worse than mark 
time. Immeasurable opportunities have been lost. 

For an hour this week I listened to the searching 
voice of a man—a young man—who a decade and a 
half ago threw himself with utter abandon into the 
heart of China. Today he is the pastor of a great 
church, the director of a great school, the superin- 
tendent of a tremendously strategic mission. In his 
Province he is the friend and counsellor of the Gov- 
ernor, the directing genius of the Chamber of Com- 
merce, the saviour of thousands from famine, and the 
deliverer of the Capital from the horrors of revolu- 
tionary bombardment. He has entered Canaan, too, 
but with a heavy heart. With crowded chapels and 
overflowing class-rooms he has pleaded for necessary 
funds to buy land for new buildings—not a large 
amount, but an imperative and minimum sum. He has 
plead in the name of fellow-Americans who have given 
their lives to this work and been buried in it. He has 
pled in the name of the Chinese Christians who are 
willing from their poverty to contribute half the funds. 
He has pled in the name of the future indigenous 
Church of the Orient which his vision sees soon 
emerging, but he has plead in vain. 

A terrible thing it is for such a man, with such a 
burden, to enter this new year. Who is to blame? 
Not his Board. It cannot spend money it does not 
have, nor can it longer borrow money for even such 
vital advanced work. The Church herself must en- 
compass these walled cities. The whole Church must 
feel the pulse of rising heathen tides. With a Moslem 


WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 73 


world expanding, but breaking up; with Asia turning 
away from ancient Gods, but in a flame of bitterness 
that America has fanned, turning to Lenines rather 
than to Christ, only a Christian statesmanship of the 
order of Paul’s, and a missionary generosity equalling 
that of the early Moravians, will bring us to the con- 
quest of our Canaan. 

And what does this Canaan hold for international 
relationships? Let us pray that it holds valleys of 
moral fruitfulness more fair than were the physical 
pastures and orchards that Caleb and Joshua gazed 
upon;—the economic rehabilitation of Europe; the 
actual reduction of armaments by agreement among 
the great Powers, and a determined approach to the 
readjustment of relations between the world of the 
white man and the world of the yellow and black. 

Utterly impossible it is in a brief summary to visual- 
ise the international land of promise or dark foreboding 
—as you are Caleb, or a grasshopper—that the new 
year opens out before us. But whatever it is and 
holds, we stand upon its nearer Jordan shore, and the 
first of its walled cities is at hand. Will we turn and 
flee, or will we crumble the battlements with our 
marching faith? The year is young and youth is ever 
eager. But do not forget that the old year was as 
young in its January, when Sarajevo and its mad stu- 
dent were less than six months away. 

Who enters Canaan? Do all enter? Do all enter 
the real Canaan with its fruitful places and rich re- 
wards, lying behind walled cities and the twentieth 
century giants of Anakim? Do all who make the 
physical crossing from the old year to the new enter 
Canaan? No! Not all who crossed between the 
divided waters of the Red Sea, not all who completed 


74 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the forty years of marching through the wilderness, 
crossed over Jordan. Not all of the hundreds of thou- 
sands who followed Moses and Aaron from the brick 
yards of Egypt, who left the flesh-pots of the Nile, 
came at last to Jericho. Indeed not all—only two! 
And not all, nor many of the millions who have left 
the old year behind them will reach the Canaan of 
the new. 

Who entered Canaan? Moses did not. With pro- 
digious labours he led Israel through forty years; years 
in which he fed and clothed her; years in which he 
perfected her worship and prepared her for war; years 
in which he codified the laws of the ancient world, har- 
monised them with the law of God, and left them with 
the Levites to be handed down through the courts of 
the centuries. But Moses did not enter Canaan, for 
Moses disobeyed, and the price of his disobedience was 
a grave on Mount Nebo. Disobedience keeps many a 
man out of Canaan. Those in authority cannot afford 
to ignore or reject the higher authority. Even a Moses 
cannot be a law unto himself. 

Men there are who tremble lest the American com- 
monwealth of sovereign states shall fail presently be- 
cause of Democracy’s inability to enforce her own 
mandates; lest, because of the unwillingness of freemen 
to respect their own government, free government on 
the North American continent shall fall of its own 
weight. 

I am not one of these. In my mind, there is no 
doubt concerning the outcome. America will not fail. 
But the determined struggle to nullify the Eighteenth 
Amendment, to destroy national Prohibition, which 
Lloyd George declares to be the greatest social adven- 
ture ever entered upon by a free people, is a decisive 


WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 75 


struggle, and has entered upon its crucial stages. 
Vastly more is at stake than the immediate issue in- 
volved. All safety for person and property; the preser- 
vation of majority rule with minority safeguards; the 
future of our courts; the balance of our government; 
the genius of our national life—these are all at stake. 
And I say to you that in such a crisis there is room for 
only one kind of citizen in this land,—the citizen who 
is for the Constitution and the law! No, Moses did 
not enter Canaan, nor will the lawless man, the moral 
pirate, the social bandit, enter the Canaan of the 
new year. 

Nor did any of those who lamented the lost flesh 
pots of Egypt cross the Jordan. Their first thought 
was for their bellies, and their loudest shout the selfish 
hunger cry. Their muscles had been hardened in the 
fields and brick yards, but their physical dependence 
upon their masters had given them flabby minds and 
left them moral weaklings. Moses led a race of slaves 
out of Egypt; slaves who could wander in a wilderness, 
but who could never take an armed city. Until a new 
generation could be born and seasoned;—a generation 
as free as the wilderness which was its first inheritance 
and as hard as the rock from which came its miracu- 
lous water supply, that river crossing waited. 

And so it is forever. Only free men will cross a 
Jordan. The Canaan of the new year lies too far away 
and there are too many giants of risk and sacrifice to 
make the invitation of a modern Caleb attractive to 
those who have their hands and hearts centered in the 
flesh pots of their time. They receive the report of 
fearless spiritual and social trail breakers, as did Israel 
of old, by lifting up their voices against those who 
would stir them from their soft and sinful places. 


76 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


And no man who feels like a flying beetle in the 
presence of Anakim will enter Canaan in the new year. 
Twelve men were sent to spy out the land, and ten 
came back feeling like grasshoppers. Only Joshua 
and Caleb returned with their heads up like true sons 
of the God who had sent them out. It was not that the 
ten saw the Canaanites as too big—it was that they 
saw themselves as too small. God pity the man who 
ignores the moral temptations, the physical risks, the 
spiritual pitfalls of the year just before us. He will 
fall an easy victim to the first surprise attack. But 
God pity the man who cannot feel himself rising to 
meet each new emergency, growing daily into the 
stature of a conqueror and companioned constantly by 
the One who is able to deliver him. 

“The Lord will bring us into this land and give it 
us,” cried Joshua and Caleb as they rent their clothes 
before their terrified companions. ‘The Lord will 
bring us! ” And, ringing down the ages ever since, 
their cry has come to hearten men for risk and danger; 
to fit men for the Jordan crossing. It comes to us 
today: ‘‘The Lord will bring us into this land and 
give it us.” But Israel, when she came first to the 
Jordan, barring two, was a race of moral grasshoppers. 
Grasshoppers have ruined many a harvest, but they 
have never yet taken a Canaan. 

Have you ever felt troubled because God sent Israel 
back into the wilderness for forty years; kept an entire 
generation out of the promised land, and buried Moses 
in banishment? Frankly, I have. And, just as 
frankly, I would be troubled now were it not for one 
fact: a very considerable fact, the fact that God did 
not send Israel back and did not keep any man out! 
Israel sent herself back; sent herself back in spite of 


WHO ENTERS CANAAN? 77 


the mighty appeal of the two unafraid scouts. Moses 
kept himself out, kept himself out in spite of his power 
with God and his own unsurpassed wisdom. And I 
promise you that there is no influence on earth or under 
it that can keep you out of Canaan save yourself. You 
are, or may be, in this matter the absolute master of 
your fate. God wills now as He did then, that His 
people go forward. God stands now as he stood then, 
to captain their salvation; to level the cities of sin; to 
overthrow the strongholds of doubt; to destroy the 
giants, and to give us their heritage. If we go back to 
the wilderness, if we refuse the Jordan, if we resign 
Canaan, ours Is the decision and responsibility for it. 

Before us, not behind us, is all that we have hur- 
riedly contemplated together—the Canaan of the new 
year, personal achievement in character, a life dedi- 
cated to a program of a clean body, a pure mind and a 
prophetic soul; a fellowship with men, women and little 
children, generous and unselfish, and a society purged 
of exploiters of every sort, with governments of the 
people, administered in full justice to all and confirmed 
and supported by all. Before us lies a new Canaan of 
world associations and unities; a Canaan with its 
armed citadels overthrown and its giants of suspicion 
and jealousy destroyed. 

Ah, but you say: ““ What a dream! How utterly im- 
possible; how wild and futile! ” Yes, wild and futile, 
indeed, when we think of that brotherhood of man 
which Jesus envisioned on the Mount of Olives more 
than nineteen hundred years ago, and of which Tenny- 
son sang again with radiant song in Locksley Hall. 
But dreams come true when dreamers move with God 
to their fulfillment. Men there are, Calebs and Josh- 
uas, who lure us to the great adventure. Men there 


78 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


are who point out the Jordan crossing. Men there are 
who laugh at giants and who cry—“ Let us go up at 
once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome 
it—and the Lord will bring us into the land and give 
it us—a land flowing in milk and honey.” Tonight in 
our hearts, as Moses on Mount Nebo beheld Canaan 
from afar, we may possess our “ promised land.” 


VIII 
“FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH” 


EBSTER gives us a definition of fact, “ any- 
thing strictly true—a reality. Also some- 
times applied to even general and abstract 

truth.”’ Our subject implies that there is such a thing 
as faith, implies at once the fact of faith, which no 
man will deny; and also implies that faith may fail. 
Faith in God, faith in man, faith in one’s self, faith in 
faith itself may fail. 

A greater tragedy cannot be imagined than the fail- 
ure of faith. No other failure is absolute. Men rise 
from business crashes to achieve even greater success 
than they knew before financial calamity overtook 
them. One plan proven faulty results in another being 
tried, which succeeds. Nations pass from triumph to 
bondage, but emerge at last from slavery to reach 
positions of political distinction far beyond their pre- 
vious stations. Truth crushed to earth will rise again 
upon the hands of faith. But when faith fails, the 
captain of industry surrenders, acknowledges himself 
beaten, retires from the field. When faith fails, there 
is no other plan. When faith fails, nations go not into 
temporary eclipse, but perish. When faith fails, truth, 
sore beset, sinks in her wounds without defenders, and 
the soul puts out his own eyes. © 

Faith is defined as a “ firm conviction of the truth.” 
Theologically, faith is the assent of the mind to the 
truth of what God has revealed; a hearty reliance upon 


79 


80 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


God and His promise of salvation through Jesus Christ. 
When faith fails here, death becomes a haunting terror, 
and life remains not worth the living. “ Faith is the 
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things 
not seen,” is Paul’s sublime definition. ‘“ Substance of 
things hoped for ’”’—an inspired paradox. Faith and 
substance; mind and matter; spirit and material. And 
we have found it to be a fact again and again demon- 
strated, that without faith substance fails and the 
material disappears. 

Does our subject also imply that the times in which 
we live are times of failing faith? For many they are. 
Within the week I have talked with a woman who bears 
high recommendations from institutions in a foreign 
country. Particularly competent she has been when 
entrusted with children. But, as the result of an acci- 
dent, she no longer has the old confidence with which 
she once went about her profession. When she is in- 
vited, even urged, to fill the position she has been fully 
trained to fill, and in which she has had wide experi- 
ence on two continents, she trembles from head to 
foot, and becomes practically helpless. At the moment 
she is working as a domestic under hard circumstances 
when in her own field there are many unfilled positions. 
Lacking faith in herself, the substance of her learning, 
the material of her training, avail little. And often 
mental, and even physical, misfortune are responsible 
for a spiritual collapse that leaves a once imperial life 
shorn of its authority. “‘ He can, because he thinks he 
can ’”—is tremendously true. 

Years ago a young attorney came to the minister of 
a great city parish and said, “‘ Doctor, I have lost my 
faith. Can you help me? More than anything else I 
need it now. I have already a measure of success, and 


FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 81 


the future is full of promise, but I have lost my faith. 
I lost it somewhere here among the books and ques- 
tions of men and universities. I must have it again, 
or all will be lost. Can you help me?” And again 
and again the story of the young attorney is being 
duplicated in this highly organised, hurrying, ques- 
tioning day. 

Young people are particularly involved. The ad- 
vanced study once entered upon by a limited number, 
now engages practically all youth, or influences them 
through popular, however superficial, magazine and 
periodical discussion. Sharp distinctions are made 
between conservative and radical thinkers in all groups 
of society. These distinctions, which actually involve 
only minor matters, are lifted into the prominence of 
major events. Young people are bewildered by the 
involved and acrimonious debates of their elders. 
What to mature minds may be little more than an in- 
tellectual diversion, becomes to minds less mature 
cause for doubt and sometimes the invitation to denial. 
Youth is naturally the age of faith. When youth 
becomes cynical, the event has a particularly tragic 
significance. 

The world needs today what another has called the 
“‘unreasoning enthusiasm of youthful devotees ”’; 
needs this ardour and abandon to sweep away the sus- 
picion and cruelty and denial of the years. Let us, 
then, we who hold the high places of scholarship and 
moral authority, think not so much of ourselves and 
those with whom we match our theories—rather less 
of ourselves and of these—and more of our sons and 
daughters. 

One evening I found myself face to face with a 
young collegian, the president of his class, and an 


82 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


officer of the college Y. M. C. A. He was terribly un- 
settled. A distinguished leader of religious thought 
had challenged his sense of fair play, had, as he keenly 
felt, insulted his intelligence. He came to me saying, 
“Tf that man is right, then I am not a Christian.” 
Almost he was ready to renounce his faith. The wrong 
attitude on my part would have completed a moral 
catastrophe, but God gave me the answer for the 
question of his soul, and again and again with others 
in a similar crisis that experience has enabled me to be 
measurably helpful. ‘‘ Whether you are a Christian 
or not depends upon no man but yourself; yourself, 
sir, yourself with Jesus Christ,” I said to him. ‘‘ The 
man may be right, or the man may be wrong. You 
should worry about him. Jesus said—' Come, follow 
me. Iam the way, the truth and the life,’ and as for 
knowing whether you are in that way or not, Paul’s 
standard has never been surpassed. ‘ The fruit of the 
spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, 
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance—against these 
there is no law.’ Remember this,” I said, ‘‘ with that 
high command of Jesus—‘ Love thy neighbour as 
thyself.’ ” 

The Christian life is not a matter of definition—right 
or wrong; intellectual affirmation—right or wrong; 
Scriptural interpretation right or wrong. The Chris- 
tian life is an experience in, with and through Jesus 
Christ. Give youth a reasonable chance, a sympa- 
thetic opportunity—give youth your confidence, and 
youth will emerge from the fog of uncertainty and 
superficiality, the twilight of doubt—aye—and the 
darkness of denial that we, youth’s elders, are too 
often responsible for. 

There was a time in my life when, had a man said 


FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 83 


to me of those principles which are now supreme in 
my soul, those articles of Christian faith which are now 
dearer to me than life itseli—when, had any man said 
to me—“ These you must believe,’ 1 would have re- 
plied—‘* Then I am not a Christian.” It was the 
Isaiah spirit of “ Let us reason together ”—it was the 
“Come and see” invitation of Jesus Himself that 
brought me through the darkness into the marvelous 
light and liberty of sonship. 

This, then, is the background for the message of the 
hour, and for all who find faith failing there are five 
restoring facts. 

First, the fact of man. Whatever man is, he is. 
Today, the temptation is strong to exalt him; to see 
him through the eyes of a worshipper; to see him at 
his best—the conqueror of continents, the master of 
the ocean and of pestilence, and the shaper of racial 
destinies. But it is not this view of man that strength- 
ens my faith particularly. It is rather man the hope- 
lessly inadequate, man the fallen creature of the God- 
like race. One of the first discoveries made by the 
infant is the discovery of human limitations. Your 
baby is forever reaching for something just beyond 
him and howling at the top of his lungs with chagrin 
and disappointment over his failure. 

There are many pictures of man—in some he rides 
at the head of victorious armies, or stands upon fron- 
tiers of physical and scientific discovery; in others he 
riots with the strength of youth, plays with love and 
beauty, courts the muses, lolls upon couches of volup- 
tuous ease. There are pictures of sin, and there are 
pictures of sacrifice, truth and error, pictures of shame 
and glory, but the picture truer than any other is this 
picture of his babyhood, where his arms are too short 


84 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


to bring him to his heart’s desire. There are times, sir, 
when this fact of man’s inadequacy drives one nearly 
mad. Your dearest treasure lies with breath halif- 
throttled in his throat and turns appealing eyes upon 
your burning, anguished face; or your son comes with 
the fresh terror of some disgrace to plead for relief 
from the shame; or debt closes slowly in upon you, 
grinds away your freshness, leaves you flimsy and 
threadbare like the old coat on the broken man; or 
disease strikes you down and you feel its remorseless, 
wasting progress. 

I stood one afternoon, in the spring of 1913, and, 
watching the rising waters of the Scioto River eat 
through the embankments that held it from the homes 
of West Columbus, I saw steel rails snap like pencils of 
slate, and a bulwark thrown up to last a century, filter 
and disappear like sand. ‘Then houses crumpled like 
cardboard, and spread out like thick cream upon the 
waters, while men and women and children bobbed 
about in the maelstrom like fishermen’s corks; nor 
could we save them. And yet, the final checking up 
after that experience revealed a rising tide of faith. 
As the people buried their dead, and sought for their 
silt-covered property lines, they turned their eyes out- 
ward and upward, and their voices lifted again the 
cry—‘‘ My help cometh from Thee,” “ Our help is in 
the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.” 
Always in such times of man’s inadequacy, faith 
strengthens. 

Faith strengthens in such a time because of the tre- 
mendous fact that companions man’s inadequacy—the 
fact of God—God, who is adequate. When all other 
qualities and attributes of God have been considered, 
the adequacy of God might well be selected as all 


i) 


FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 85 


inclusive, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent—ade- 
quate! Adequate for man, the inadequate. 

We reach out to take possession of life’s dearest 
prize, and find ourselves still with the shortened arms 
of childhood. We stand by and watch the floods of 
adversity sweep over the things of our heart’s desire. 
We feel the creeping palsy of the years, the withering 
blight of adversity and, in our extremity, we cry— 
“Whither shall we flee?” and in our extremity lies 
God’s opportunity. He answers, ‘‘ My grace is suf- 
ficient for you.”—‘‘ Come unto Me.” He knows, and 
knowing, understands. He is present and ready to 
help. He is able and He places Himself at our dis- 
posal. Our God is sufficient. 

Yes, ah, yes, I hear you say, but God is your as- 
sumption, not necessarily a fact. Not necessarily a 
fact? Let us see. Above the great concourse of the 
Grand Central Station, in New York City, is a tiny 
engine and several obsolete coaches, forerunners of our 
twentieth century giant Moguls of the rails. What 
does that tiny engine prove? Many things, to be sure, 
but chiefly this—the fact of an engine maker. The 
fact of an engine maker who knew the genius of his 
creation, who was its master—who was sufficient. 

The most sublime fact of human life is the fact of 
personality; the fact of you. Yow, not your eyes and 
hands and voice, but you. That which we miss when 
you are gone—gone though for a little, while we still 
may touch your hands and caress your face. Reason 
leads me to God. Behind every visible manifestation 
is a cause, and at the beginning Is “ First Cause.” 
Now, First Cause would satisfy me were I dealing 
alone with continents and oceans, stars and planets— 
aye, and bleating flocks and the winged creatures of 


86 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the air. But you baffle me until reason rises to another 
level and I see “in the beginning God.” God, who is 
the greater. God, who is the Creator, to be sure, but. 
God, who must be Personality. Personality omnis- 
cient, omnipresent, omnipotent. 

These are facts for failing faith. The fact of man— 
man, the inadequate; and the fact of God—God, the 
adequate. 

A third fact for failing faith is the fact of Death. 
Death which Horace declared is ‘“‘ the ultimate bound- 
ary of human matters”; death, which comes equally 
to us all and which makes us all equal when it comes: 


“The Prince who kept the world in awe, 
The Judge whose dictate fixed the law; 
The rich, the poor, the great, the small, 
Are levelled; death confounds them all,” 


There is no arguing against the fact of death—for 
“all that tread the globe are but a handful to the 
tribes that slumber in its bosom; take the wings of 
the morning and the Barcan desert pierce; or lose thy- 
self in the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon, 
and hears no sounds save its own dashings—yet the 
dead are there, and millions in those solitudes, since 
first the flight of years began, have laid them down in 
their last sleep.” And now on Long Island the man 
who wrote those exquisite lines sleeps with the millions 
of “ death’s solitude.” 

But what is death? One has written: 


°*Tis slumber to the weary, 
°Tis rest to the forlorn, 

*Tts shelter to the dreary; 
"Tis peace amid the storm, 


FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 87 


*Tts the entrance to our home, 
°*Tts the passage to that God 
Who bids His children come 
When this weary course 1s trod. 


Yes, such is death. 

But no poetic passage can remove the natural 
antipathy that the normal man has for death. It is 
quite unnatural to welcome death. The philosophy 
that cultivates an attitude of welcome is neither human 
nor Christian. God created man to live and not to die, 
and God’s will for us all is that we should live well and 
long—as long as we can and as well as we can by His 
grace. But with so personal and so appalling a fact 
as death, appalling, I mean, by mere human and nat- 
ural conceptions, with so appalling a fact as death, con- 
stantly crowding up to us—what is there in this fact 
that strengthens failing faith? 

The first instinct of a human being under attack is 
to defend himself. He looks for a weapon, or a means 
of protection. Eventually he plans a campaign of 
defence. Man regards death as his greatest natural 
enemy, and fights against him with every resource of 
his mind and will. And yet, after all the aeons of 
time that have elapsed since God set the forces of life 
in motion, man has discovered only one way to con- 
quer death. Not by the waters of a magic spring; not 
by the curative powers of a mysterious drug; not at 
last by the husbandry of strength, the conserving of 
physical resources, but by loving beyond it, do we 
conquer death. Because man instinctively loves be- 
yond death, irresistibly loves beyond death, death 
strengthens faith. 

Let stark and naked arms lift a darling baby from 


88 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


its cradle and weeping eyes lift instinctively to the un- 
failing hills whence cometh their strength. Strike 
down the strong man in his prime and his friends find 
their consolation in—‘‘ I am the resurrection and the 
life ’—invade the sacred precincts of a home; break 
up with unexpected blow the happy family; leave tears 
for laughter there, and above the weeping you will hear 
the song of rapture: ‘“ Glad I am to know the crossing. 
In the sullen tide between, hither banks that fade and 
tarnish and the fields of living green.” ‘Tear a brother 
from the side of a self-styled infidel, and the unbeliever 
will turn from blatant denial to cry—“ But in the night 
of death, hope sees a star, and, listening love can hear 
the rustle of a wing.” Faith baffled becomes faith 
strengthened. It is in death, in the stern, cold, unre- 
lenting fact of it, that I have seen the fires of hope 
rekindled and felt again the immortal flame that shin- 
eth more and more unto the perfect day! Death 
Strengthens faith because instinctively, irresistably, 
omnipotently, we love beyond it. 

And with this fact of death walks hand in hand the 
fact of life—as twin sisters dark and fair they move 
together through the souls of men. 

Without opportunity for a doubt life is a fact. 
“What Life Is ” has been the subject for many a wise 
debate and learned dissertation, and will continue thus 
to serve so long as life itself shall survive. But the 
fact of life is at the very beginning of wisdom. Why, 
then, do men question—“‘ What is Life?” Why? 
Because no man has yet satisfactorily answered the 
question. Because no man has ever explained life. 
Because no man knows what life is. Reason has yet 
to solve life’s riddle. Science has yet to explain life’s 
reason. Not until you are able to reduce God to the 


FIVE FACTS FOR FAILING FAITH! 89 


component parts of a laboratory demonstration will 
this problem be completed. Perhaps it has never oc- 
curred to you that life which we cannot explain, but 
which unmistakably is, we must accept by faith. In- 
evitably life, until you deliberately, finally deny it— 
until you destroy it, strengthens faith. 

And what is it about life, particularly, that strength- 
ens faith? The beauty of it? Verdant, flowered, well 
watered, singing nature—green in the spring time, 
radiant in summer, flaming in autumn and frozen in 
winter? But no beauty of nature is permanent. In- 
deed no attribute of life save one is permanent. 
Beauty, strength, joy, ambition—all pass, and passing, 
leave behind their disappointment, their disillusion- 
ment, their question—What is life? But one attribute 
of life does not change; does not pass; does not fail— 
Life’s resurrection—Life’s rebirth. From acorn to 
tree, and back again and on forever with God forever 
at the beginning is the way of the worlds! I have said 
that reason has yet to solve life’s riddle, but it is the 
logic of events that leads even a savage to chant songs 
of immortality. The desert blossoms and dies to 
flower again with another springtime; the humble 
worm sleeps through a season and then awakens in 
colours that match the rainbow—am I not more than 
these? The fact of life strengthens faith—Life which 
is forever renewing itself; Life which we have now and 
which is but as an infant’s span to that glorious immor- 
tality our faith lays confident hold upon. 

The fact of man. The fact of God. The fact of 
death. The fact of life—four facts for failing faith. 
What is the fifth fact that strengthens failing faith? 
Why, faith! Faith strengthens failing faith—faith 
that struggles with itself, but struggling, grows. Faith 


90 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


that staggers like a drunken man, but staggering, stag- 
gers on. Faith that doubts. Faith that questions. 
Faith that cries in mighty travail, sweating drops of 
blood. “I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” Faith 
is an instinct, but it is also an exercise. Its origin is 
divine, but even divinity must serve to survive. Do 
you say, ‘‘ But I cannot believe.”’ You may say it, and 
you may believe it, but-you are mistaken. Reverse the 
order! Shift from negative to positive. Rise in the 
morning declaring your faith and not your doubt, 
praying Paul’s omnipotent prayer and shouting to all 
the winds that blow, “‘ I believe! ” If you do, I pledge 
you my word, I give you the word of God that you will 
find faith mightier than denial. 

God, Man, Death, Life, Faith—these five! And the 
five are one!. They issue in a life conquering death and 
in man at last hid forever with Christ in God. 


IX 
A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 


HE Temple of Solomon, that most glorious of 

the ancient works of man, ushered in the first 

Cathedral Age. To it the nations came bearing 

gifts and chanting praises. Prophetic of the Bethle- 

hem Manger and the advent of the Prince of Peace, it 

waited for the passing of King David, the mighty 

warrior, to be builded by his son, Solomon, the man 
of wisdom. 

The second Cathedral Age still shares with us its 
sublime monuments. For the tourist the cathedral is 
still the centre of Europe. While in its day it was the 
seat of the people’s life, in our time it remains as the 
most articulate expression of the period it dominated. 
- But one may question whether cathedral building 
now would be justified,—whether the vast and exquis- 
ite monuments of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, 
if raised upon the central hills of our modern cities 
would capture the imagination as in those more primi- 
tive and less exacting times. It is, however, increasingly 
apparent that somehow the Christian Church must do 
again what she once did with the cathedral; that some- 
how with her message she must lay hold upon the vital 
life of her generation—capture it as completely as she 
did with Milan, Cologne, Rheims and Westminster. 

When one visits Rome, be he Christian or Pagan, he 
sees first St. Peter’s. At Seville he must cross the 
threshold of a church or have no story to tell when he 


91 


92 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


returns from his journey. Even Paris, with her Opera 
and the life of her cafés, has in first place for the ex- 
pectant foreigner Notre Dame and the Madeleine. It 
is not the Tower in London, nor the Houses of Parlia- 
ment, but the Christian temple, which holds the bones 
and the trophies of Britain’s glories. 

Certainly this principle does not hold for New York. 
Even the glorious new. St. John’s will not supplant the 
Woolworth Tower, the subways, Wall Street, Fifth 
Avenue, Broadway and Times Square, as peculiarly 
expressive of Manhattan. 

But does not the Church today have a message as 
peculiar and commanding, as that of the Cathedral 
Age? And may it not be expressed as impressively, 
indeed as sublimely, for the eye and soul as it was 
then? May we not hope that there will come a time 
when travelers visiting New York and Chicago, and 
every other modern city of the world, will see the 
Christian Church and study her institutions and pro- 
gramme, or return whence they came as foolish as any 
tourist who should journey to Agra and miss the Taj 
Mahal? Should not the Christian Church in modern 
life be as inevitable as her cathedrals were in the 
Middle Ages? 

The answer is not simple, nor is it to be expected 
that all who are interested will agree upon it. The 
writer suggests that there is only one basis for ap- 
proaching this matter with fair hope of reaching an 
agreement,—the Service basis. 

As I write, I feel the movement of traffic about one 
of New York’s busiest corners. Here rest in solid 
granite the foundations of one of America’s most 
venerable churches. About the iron fences that 
enclose the lofty tower surges a mighty multitude. 


A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 93 


This multitude presents to me an appalling fact—the 
fact that the crowd does not know that we exist. The 
marble walls rise as chastely as they did seventy years 
ago. The great bell booms as it boomed above the 
heads of draft rioters in Sixty-three. The organ peals, 
the preacher proclaims, and the faithful gather, but 
the multitude out there, speaking more languages than 
ever troubled the builders of Babel, does not know that 
anything is happening.. Better were it for Christ’s 
Kingdom if again the mob despised and reviled! 

What are we going to do about it? Should any- 
thing be done? Or, should we withdraw and allow the 
little figures on the stage of life to change? Or, recon- 
ciled, should we go on ministering to the relatively few? 

The problem is the problem of the whole Church. 
In it is the gravest challenge that the Christian re- 
ligion has ever known. ‘The lions of Nero and the 
burning torches of the Appian Way helped make Rome 
a Christian state. But this indifference, this indiffer- 
ence which is a rising tide, will sweep from us the 
stronghold we have held since Constantine, if we do 
not find a way to rise above it. Is the Service basis 
our way to triumph? 

Chicago has now a religious edifice that boasts the 
highest pinnacle in the city. Its tower is a spire sur- 
mounted by across. It is a cathedral of another sort. 
The impression it has made upon the country, the 
publicity as well as service value it has established for 
religious architecture, at least suggest that to watch its 
future closely will be worth our while. Certainly now 
no man, certainly no tourist, will visit this railroad 
metropolis of the United States without going to see 
a church. 

New York has at least the promise of a similar 


94 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


experiment. It is proposed to make the Broadway 
Temple upon Washington Heights the highest structure 
in the city. The architect, with great daring, if pre- 
liminary drawings which I have seen may be trusted, 
has combined the appeal to the spiritual with the 
service necessities of a twentieth century social work- 
shop. There will be no lost space—sewing rooms, class 
halls, dormitories and gymnasiums, will be given atten- 
tion along with chapels, organs and auditoriums. All 
will be brought together to achieve a symmetrical 
whole. Some day I believe that a supreme modern 
cathedral dream will rise into a reality of marble and 
steel in the very heart of New York City. Then every 
inquirer who enters the ‘‘ Narrows ” with the question, 
‘““What is the genius of America? ” will receive the 
answer: “ The Christian Church.” 

If Christianity is what we profess; if Christianity is 
what we believe; if the programme of this Jesus-way 
of life is the only complete, the only adequate pro- 
gramme for modern times; if He is our God and our 
only Saviour, should not the house of His Gospel be 
the first edifice in every city? Should there not be a 
new Cathedral Age? 

The Service principle followed through will make 
every room of these new cathedrals, every article of 
equipment, every member of the staff, pass the test 
and meet the requirements of the Service basis. 

A little while ago I visited a religious institutional 
centre in a great city. Passing, with the minister, 
through the main auditorium, I heard terrifying sounds 
issuing from the pipe-organ, and saw a young woman 
seated at the console. Noticing my amazement, my 
guide said: ‘She is a young student who is too poor 
to secure practice privileges on any other instrument. 


A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 95 


We place our organ at her disposal.” ‘ But,” I ex- 
claimed, ‘‘ she will ruin it! ” ‘‘ No,” he replied, “‘ she 
has!” And that was the story of the entire establish- 
ment. Everything there was in it to be ruined in 
service. There were no carpets to protect from toilers’ 
heavy shoes; no pews to be reserved from odoriferous 
foreigners. The place was a Service institution. 

Let me say here that a Service programme to be 
serviceable must be reasonable and intelligent, of 
course. For instance, to ask people who do not care 
for garlic to sit in close rooms, church auditoriums 
or otherwise with those who do, is unreasonable. An 
intelligent Service programme builds churches and 
maintains activities in deference to racial characteris- 
tics and group qualities, not because we are better than 
others are but because others are as good as we are. 

One evening a group of religious leaders sat as guests 
of a distinguished Japanese, in the Nippon Club, and 
unanimously pledged themselves to campaign for a 
Japanese Christian institution in New York. This is 
the spirit of the Service basis. 

And the spirit of the Service basis is the spirit of 
adaptability. Not far from the institutional church 
already referred to, stands a venerable edifice that once 
housed numerous activities and a prosperous congrega- 
tion. But the life of the community has completely 
changed. Names from Central and Southern Europe 
are written over the German names that formerly ap- 
peared. The once crowded edifice is now practically 
deserted; a few still gather to renew old memories, 
review earlier traditions and lament the present. 
These must move out within the year. Unwilling to 
accept the facts of their surroundings, refusing to adapt 
_themselves to their new opportunities, they have been 


96 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


denied further missionary contributions by their de- 
nomination. No longer able to remain a self-support- 
ing church, they lack the vision to reach out after a 
new career. 

This service test makes inevitable a re-survey of 
every city parish—a survey not in terms of a local 
organisation, or even of a denomination, but a survey 
planned and executed by a united church, to secure 
first a complete community record of needs—phys- 
ical, intellectual, social, moral and spiritual. For in- 
stance, it would seem that an Open-Air Pulpit at the 
particular crowded corner I have written about, where 
perhaps ninety per cent. of the thousands who linger 
during the noon hours are Jews, to preach the second 
coming of Jesus Christ would be a wasteful, a futile 
thing. Whatever the opinion, the theological view- 
point of the minister may be, these people do not even 
know that Jesus ever came. Are we not, in much of 
our activity, off-shooting the mark as far as this? 
There is reason for saying to this noonday multitude, 
and for saying it with all the skill of the finest outdoor 
speaker—for saying it always in the name of Christ 
and to His glory—“ Neglectful Catholic, go back to 
your Cathedral; indifferent Jew, return to your Syna- 
gogue; forgetful Protestant, remember your Church; 
unaroused Citizen, pay the price of your freedom as 
your fathers once did—register and vote. Observe the 
law!” There is reason for such a message, delivered 
in the expectation that then the Spirit of God, the Holy 
Spirit, will complete the good work thus begun. In- 
deed, we have in actual experience the demonstration 
of the fact that He does. 

The new Cathedral Age will study the needs and 
become familiar with the conditions of men; it will 


A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 97 


listen for the voice of the people and come forth with 
an answer for the question of the searching though 
spiritually indifferent multitude. 

In a congested, foreign-speaking district of the city, 
four years ago the entire programme of the church was 
changed. What I have called the Service basis was 
first carefully considered and then accepted. Today 
forty thousand people of all races and faiths and con- 
ditions are directly ministered to by a Health Centre 
that still carries the name that was formerly associ- 
ated with only a fragment of what was actually the 
programme of Jesus when in the flesh, “‘ He went about 
doing good.” There are day-nurseries and kinder- 
gartens, dental, eye and maternity clinics, and a score 
of other equally important activities. Three thousand 
one hundred and sixty-five families are on the lists of 
the visiting nurses. Here the children come with 
twisted limbs and incipient rickets. From this 
friendly, healing-place they go out to summer-farms. 
In four years the annual budget has grown from 
nothing to one hundred thousand dollars; and from a 
beginning in a basement room to a day-and-night 
programme, housed in a four-story building but over- 
flowing into the church-tower. That tower, always 
ornamental, has become useful. 

The Service basis does not eliminate the evangelical, 
evangelistic message. It does give it added power. It 
brings it to the ears of a multitude that were indiffer- 
ent. It pushes back the horizon of religious oppor- 
tunity until fields that were in the fog are now clearly 
defined and stand revealed as white unto the Christian 
harvest. This Service basis covers the whole. Inevi- 
tably it contemplates body, mind and soul. Inevitably 
it includes both the individual and the social order. 


98 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Inevitably it accepts as the challenge of Christ’s King- 
dom the building of a new world through the raising up 
and empowering of new world builders. | 

In this Service basis, the Church must place first 
Leadership and prepheay She deals preeminently in 
moral and spiritual values. In practical affairs that 
join their issues where Moses said, “‘ Thou shalt not! ” 
and Jesus declared “ ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself,” she cannot afford to remain silent and those 
who are her voice should be ashamed to speak last. If 
Jesus Christ is for man and for his society, the only 
sufficient Saviour; if civilisation’s ultimatum is Christ 
or chaos, then Christ’s Church should in moral matters 
lead the State. 

-Shall there be a new Cathedral Age? We have the 
answer. There may be. The world needs it. The 
Church has within herself the materials out of which 
to build it and Jesus Christ has waited too long already. 
‘““T am come that ye might have Life, and that ye 
might have it more abundantly ”—‘ That ye might 
have it to the full,” He said, and all the world is crying 
with the early Greeks, “‘ Sirs, we would see Jesus.” 

Let us raise His house again upon the central place 
of the cities. Let us fill man’s eye and soul with it 
once more. Let us make its message the supreme min- 
istry of human life. 

But, after all has been said and done, this new 
Cathedral Age will not stand in the “ loop ” district of 
Chicago and upon Washington Heights. It will rise 
not in walls of steel and facades of stone. It must rise 
first of all in the minds of the people, in the souls of 
children and women and men. 

I have a fragment from an oaken beam that for six 
hundred and thirty-four years spanned the nave of 


A NEW CATHEDRAL AGE 99 


Christ Church in Hull-on-Humber. Beveled and worn 
by dry decay and the ravages of worms, it is a beauti- 
ful replica of a Gothic tower. To me the most inter- 
esting thing about it is the round hole, burned perhaps, 
through which workmen passed the wooden pin that 
held it fast. Ah, that workman! And behind him the 
master builders, and behind them the architects and 
behind the architects the Spirit that moved upon the 
face of the waters and separated the day from the 
night! And as it was in the beginning, so is it now 
and ever shall be. 

The first Cathedral Age was born in the soul of 
Israel. ‘The second came forth from the travail of 
Rome to lift its spires and domes like banners of prom- 
ise above the Dark Ages. The new Cathedral Age 
must catch up again the infinite longing of man; must 
articulate once more his age-old cry, ‘“‘ Light! Light!— 
More Light! ”; must temple his aspirations in a minis- 
try to body and soul as inclusive and complete as that 
of Jesus who fed the hungry and healed the sick and 
saved the sinner and raised the dead. 

Ah, and I have felt a more stately Cathedral than 
that of Cologne; a more sublime edifice than that of 
Milan. In a simple though beautiful room it towered 
above the human wreckage of the Bowery. It was the 
spirit of John Hallimond. Before me as I spoke lay 
his slight, familiar form—immaculate and beautiful in 
death. Strong men, sin spawned but born again, wept 
for love of him; thanked God because of him and testi- 
fied that in his quarter of a century of ministry as 
Superintendent of the Bowery Mission, he had wrought 
a change on that wicked thoroughfare almost as great 
as Jonah wrought in ancient Nineveh. I seemed to 
see the crowded room enlarge to welcome back the 


100 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


thousands he had seen redeemed,—off-scourings of 
society, scum of the earth they had been, but now 
beautiful in grace and perfect in purity. And in that 
revelation of the love which passeth knowledge, I heard 
the echo of far-born voices that said, “‘ Behold, the 
Kingdom of God is within you. Ye—yYe are the 
temple of God.” 


xX 
DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 


\ A | HEN the hand came out of the darkness that 
clung to the high arches of the royal banquet- 
ing room, in ancient Babylon, and wrote upon 
the wall before the horrified eyes. of Belshazzar and 
his drunken guests, a stark, mad fear of the un- 
known gripped the blasphemous monarch’s heart. 
“What is it? What does it mean? ” was his frenzied 
cry. ‘‘ Give me the interpretation, oh! men of wisdom, 
and with you I will divide my kingdom.” Eventually 
it was the queen mother who reminded the king of the 
wise Hebrew who in other times had served his royal 
masters faithfully. Daniel it was who unfolded the 
mystery. 
_ This is not a historical sketch. Our concern is with 
doubt, the doubt that makes cowards of us all—for it 
is doubt that feeds the fiercest fears of man. We, with 
Belshazzar, would have our doubts dissolved. We who 
find ourselves slyly prompted to doubt our friends, 
stealthily encouraged to question the motives of our 
associates, brazenly challenged to resign our confidence 
in good, and in God, are interested, more than casually 
interested, in the drunken monarch’s search for one to 
dissolve his doubts. Suspense is often worse than 
reality. The hardest thing is. to wait—not knowing. 
‘Am I to live, or am I to die? ” queries Belshazzar. 
“For what shall I prepare? ” When his doubts were 
at last dissolved, and he knew the worst, he rewarded 


101 


102 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the one who understood the language of the herald of 
his doom. Yes, doubt, however severe the hurt of 
knowledge may be, is worse than knowledge. “ Tell 
me the worst’’—how often does this groping world 
hear that cry of anguish. 


“Our doubts are traitors, and make us 
Lose the good we oft might win 
By fearing to attempt.” 


And another has said—‘‘ Known mischiefs have their 
cure, but doubts have none.”’ No man, no woman, may 
hope to entirely escape this subtle curse—we all must 
feel at one time or another the chill terror that roused 
the reveller of the lesson from his cups. 


“Life's sunmest hours are not without 
The shadow of some lingering doubt. 
Amid its highest joys will steal 
Supplies of evil yet to feel— 

Its warmest love ts blent with fears, 
Its confidence a trembling one; 

Its smile—the harbinger of tears, 

lis hope—the change of April’s sun!” 


This generation is being challenged by doubt as no 
other generation in modern times. Perhaps, because 
this generation has more sinister realities to create 
doubts. The world is not a well ordered place at the 
present writing. Society is not a victorious institution. 
There are responsible leaders in politics and in religion 
who would not be surprised to find another prophetic 
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin written high upon the wall 
of human destiny. Are we perhaps even now being 
weighed and found wanting as were Nineveh and 
Babylonia and Greece and Rome? 


DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 103 


But there is little productive value in such contem- 
plations. Let the lesson have its more immediate and 
personal application. We, you and I, are being encour- 
aged to doubt, are being asked to doubt. The age is 
one in which personal doubt is even glorified. Old 
principles in human relationship, old standards in 
moral government, old doctrines in religion, in Chris- 
tian faith, are being thrown into the crucible of the 
laboratory. Nothing seems finally written for the 
average mind; nowhere is the record closed. There 
isino =O. B.D??? 

The intellectual atmosphere of the day is often un- 
healthy. Our psychology is too frequently destructive 
and our philosophy superficial, if not immoral. 

My quarrel with seminaries and colleges where faith 
is so often made a jester’s bauble is not that denial, 
direct and brazen, is given a voice, but that a question 
is written after every great spiritual affirmation. My 
chief concern is not with leaders of thought who have a 
positive No for my opinion, a positive No which may 
be as constructive as a positive Yes. My chief concern 
is with those who give cry to all their uncertainties, 
who drag the moral experiments that should at least be 
confined to the laboratory, into the open classroom and 
public forum; who, with a certain scholarly distinction, 
publish all that they do not believe, and who seem 
with malicious delight to underdig the foundations of 
Church and State. 

Do I hear someone say: “ But we must be intel- 
lectually honest.” Certainly, and that I will be. But 
I am not intellectually honest when, doubting my be- 
liefs, I become a night crier of my doubts. Common 
honesty dictates silence while I go about the solemn 
business of confirming my faith or establishing its un- 


104 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


soundness—honesty with myself, and more especially 
honesty with others, who may be influenced against 
truth by some uncertainty of mine which in the light 
of later evidence and conviction may be entirely re- 
moved. To the man who calls to me—* Doubt your 
beliefs,’ I answer—‘ Assuredly no.” First I will 
doubt my doubts. As for you—‘ Believe your be- 
liefs.” To you all I. say it—‘‘ Believe your beliefs, 
your beliefs that have sweetened your bitter, illumined 
your way, lightened your burden, assuaged your sor- 
row, and given to your soul the ardent hope and glori- 
ous expectancy of immortality.” What have the great 
beliefs of our Christian religion done for us and for 
the world? Lay down the test here. Judge each tree 
of our faith by its fruits. 

The Virgin Birth has given to the world a new order 
of manhood, a new conception of womanhood, and in- 
creased the tender touch of Jesus upon the suffering 
heart of the common people. Much of modern the- 
ology tells me to doubt the Virgin Birth. My answer 
is “‘ Doubt that doubt.” Change the order. Give faith 
at least the first chance. Seek first the confirmations 
and not the denials. A vast number there are who do 
not realise that the reasoned arguments outside of 
Holy Writ favoring the Virgin Birth would fill a vast 
library, and have won the acknowledgment of states- 
men and scholarly intellectuals, as well as of mystics 
and devotees. In the light of learning, and in the face 
of nineteen hundred years of human experience with 
the divine as revealed in Jesus Christ I say as to the 
Virgin Birth, begin right; begin by doubting your 
doubt. 

And the Atonement. I hear a man say: ‘“ How can 
Christ’s death save us? ” and I reply, “‘ How else may 


DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 105 


we be saved; who else can save us? I cannot save 
myself. I cannot forgive myself. My sins remain un- 
covered and the agony of my remorse finds no surcease. 
What can wash away my sin—nothing but the blood of 
Jesus.” Doubt my belief in that—No. I will doubt 
my doubt. Have I not seen that belief turn the drunk- 
ard’s feet from the gutter, lift the fallen woman from 
the hell of shame, burn out an ancient hatred, and 
destroy a mountain feud? Have I not felt within my 
own soul the unspeakable mysteries of that grace? I 
will believe my belief! I will doubt my doubt! 

To the teacher, to the preacher, to the layman who 
publishes his immature spiritual conclusion, his incom- 
plete laboratory experiment, so as to destroy ancient 
good,—who declares his unprofitable doubts so as to 
undermine beliefs that have saved men from their sins 
and advanced society toward moral health and Chris- 
tian brotherhood, I say—Stop, thief! and to us all, 
“Doubt your Doubts. Believe your Beliefs! ” 
Some time since a widely known leader of religious 
thought, in a defense of those who are committed to a 
policy of question raising with regard to long held and 
time honoured evangelical beliefs referred to a certain 
building operation going forward in New York City at 
the time, as aptly illustrating the situation in the Prot- 
estant Church. He said that to make way for a mod- 
ern office and apartment building, the fine old residence 
with its high ceiling, artistic mantles and walnut wood 
work must come down; that the day of the ancient 
house was past; that the present must be served. And 
so he concluded that the day of many ancient theo- 
logical declarations and venerable Christian beliefs had 
closed. There was an element of truth in what the 
gentleman said. Jesus Christ spoke the language of 


106 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


his generation, and was called a heretic because of his 
“ modernism.” And Christianity is less than Christ- 
like when it lacks the initiative and courage, the adapt- 
ability and faith, to meet the new duties new occasions 
teach; when it fails to grip and hold as Jesus did, its 
present age. 

But let us study the illustration and its application 
more closely. The ancient, beautiful house came 
down, but not a venerable stone was disturbed until the 
master builder had in his hands the complete plans for 
the new edifice, until he held the drawings to their last 
detail, of the larger and more profitable structure. 
Simple wisdom and honesty demand that this house of 
our evangelical faith be undermined at no point, re- 
placed in no stone of its building, until we have in hand 
the demonstrated better part. The structure of our 
Faith has stood, sheltering and protecting a vast multi- 
tude of all conditions of people since Calvary laid down 
its foundations and raised up its roof tree. By its 
altars men have been made strong to live and brave to 
die. Here little children have felt the tender touch of 
Society’s growing sense of responsibility, and woman- 
hood has come into her own; here grief has found the 
only final comfort, death the only destroyer, and the 
sinner his only Saviour. Let the wrecker keep hands 
off until he comes with the completed drawings and 
the approved plans from the Divine Architect for some- 
thing better and more divine. My doubts, my wrest- 
ling with doubt, my intellectual and spiritual labora- 
tory work, belong to my study and my closet. The cry 
of the world is ‘‘ Sir, we would see Jesus.” ‘‘ We would 
hear from you, as the ambassador of God, that which 
you both know and have experienced.”’ 

Someone has said that science has put everything 


DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 107 


into questions, and that literature distils them to make 
an atmosphere. In other words, science raises doubt. 
The emphasis of religion is frankly otherwise. The 
emphasis of Christianity is upon faith. And in prac- 
tice we all, in all our activities and processes, must 
walk by faith. Even science walks by faith. Science 
believes that there is a cure for leprosy, and in spite 
of centuries of laboratory failure, still believes. Some 
day this faith of science will be rewarded. Science 
believed that lightning could be harnessed to bear bur- 
dens and draw loads, and now this celestial mystery, 
still unfathomed, has become our slave. 

Any great truth of Christian experience is doubtable. 
No profound Christian experience can be given a 
laboratory demonstration. And yet are these experi- 
ences less real because they do not carry the endorse- 
ment of the chemist’s sign? Put mother love into your 
test tube, if you can! 

The very way in which our life begins raises ques- 
tions, and questions are the children of doubt. We 
come into the world knowing nothing, having all to 
learn. It is inevitable that we should suffer disillusion- 
ment as well as experience enlightenment. Eventually 
we are tempted to doubt all and to make of uncertainty 
our normal state of mind. Accept the admonition of 
our subject. Make the practice of its psychology your 
daily programme until it becomes a subconscious exer- 
cise, the intuition with which you look out upon all of 
life. “‘ Doubt your doubts.” 

But now the practical question. How is doubt dis- 
solved? No one can dissolve doubt for you. Daniel 
could interpret the handwriting on the wall, but after 
all Daniel could not lift the moral fear from the soul 
of the Bacchanalian King. Nor is doubt dissolved by 


108 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


inquiry and research. Darwin went to the ends of the 
earth and to the bottom of scientific learning without 
reaching the end of his doubt. Doubt is dissolved not 
alone by the intellectual apprehension and comprehen- 
sion of truth, but by the individual trial and applica- 
tion of truth, by leaning upon truth, by living truth. 
It is very simple, but, even so, very difficult. It is as 
simple as this—‘‘ Whereas I was blind, now I see.” 
And yet difficult, I say. Asa child I was thrown down 
by a great wave and half strangled in the briny water 
of the Pacific Ocean. My father rescued me. Scream- 
ing at the top of my water-logged lungs, I was carried 
back to the beach. I can still hear my father say— 
“You are all right, don’t be afraid.” But still I 
screamed. With the sturdy evidence of my safety in 
my father’s arms which had lifted me up and borne me 
out, I still doubted. Doubt your doubts—for they are 
often as childish and foolish as were mine. 

What would happen if, in the daily average of our 
lives, we were not to adventure our faith instead of our 
fears? Were we to delay starting from our homes for 
our offices until with mathematical certainty we could 
guarantee our safe arrival, we should never arrive, for 
we would never start. I know of a gentleman and his 
wife who determined to anticipate every possible 
emergency of a round the world trip. They went to 
the hospital and enjoyed appendicitis operations while 
in perfect health, to avoid the possibility of a sudden 
seizure while in mid-Africa or some other unsanitary 
and unsterilized quarters of the globe! The oper- 
ations were successful, but did not make the patients 
immune to smallpox, which they contracted in Singa- 
pore. Believe your beliefs when they are ennobling; 
when they build morals, when they make you happy, 


DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 109 


efficient and courageous. Doubt your doubts till 
the last. 

Our moral, as well as our mental, integrity is in- 
volved in this principle, for—‘‘ As a man thinketh in 
his heart, so is he.” Doubt begins by being a mental 
or spiritual attitude, but if it persists and prevails, it 
issues in the habits and practices of the life. When I 
say regularly, and in good faith, “I will doubt every 
doubt of good in another; I will not be blind, but I will 
not try to see that which does not exist; nor will I by 
a feeble, intellectual attitude dissipate my faith in the 
ennobling, in the wholesome,” I may not automatically 
and at once remove all my doubt, all my dark forebod- 
ings, but I shall put them on the defensive, and in nine 
cases out of ten I will start them on the way to oblivion. 
Ah! more than this, such an attitude toward doubt 
places us at once where we may without shame and in 
perfect confidence use the prayer God answers first— 
‘““T believe, help thou mine unbelief.” 

To doubt doubt is to become unafraid of doubt! 
The young male of the buffalo herd was on his way to 
triumph when he began to doubt the power of his 
ancient master. The victim of a debasing appetite 
turns his face toward moral triumph when, from doubt- 
ing his own will power and God’s saving grace, he 
begins to doubt that doubt. 

Another has said “‘ Never try to conquer doubt ahead 
of time, or never try to force your mind to believe, to 
drive it to accept new and undemonstrable truths.”” To 
do this is like trying to fall asleep, or labouring to be 
happy. Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs, 
but neither exercise your mind to find doubts to doubt, 
nor drive your reason to uncover new beliefs to believe. 

Let us illustrate the principle: A person tells you an 


110 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


evil story about someone you have trusted, an under- 
cover story—gossip of sinister import. Cultivate a 
mental reflex that answers—‘I doubt it.” One 
evening in the lobby of a Washington hotel a gentle- 
man of loose speech told a vicious tale about the then 
President of the United States. He wound up his lurid 
recital with the question that never anticipates an 
answer—‘ Now, what do you think of that?” A 
friend of mine, whose instincts of fair-play had been 
outraged, stood shoulder to shoulder with the verbose 
traducer, and said with an unmistakable implication, 
‘““ What do I think of that? Why, I think that’s a lie!” 

But let us not make it a practice to go out of our 
way to hear doubt carrying scandal in order that we 
may exercise our anti-doubt reflex. There is no profit, 
and no beauty, no reward of holiness in spending our 
days with our theological fists up looking for a fight; 
shouting to the world in tones of rancour and com- 
bativeness, “I believe this or that, and as for you, 
challenge it on peril of having me smash at your 
Orthodoxy.” Rather let us cultivate the habit of rising 
in the morning with a great “‘ I believe ” trumpeting in 
our souls; let us greet each new occasion with the mind 
and faith of the never-to-be-forgotten hour when first 
the peace of Christ filled our souls. 

Yes, doubt your doubts. But what of their burning, 
unanswered questions? Honest questions, too. Ques- 
tions uninvited that rise out of the body of our suffer- 
ing, the mind of our ignorance, the heart of our grief, 
and that we come upon in our quest of truth. What 
about these? Certainly we must face them without 
evasion, unafraid. The only man who has no reason 
to fear the deepest, the most appalling question, is the 
Christian. Let us face every question as searchers who 


DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS 111 


follow One who said, ‘“ Ye shall know the truth, and © 
the truth shall make you free! ”’ 

Horace Bushnell wrote that one of the greatest tal- 
ents in religious discovery is finding how to hang up 
questions and let them hang without being at all anx- 
ious about them. Then while we go on about our 
business of living and loving and serving, doubting our 
doubts and believing our beliefs, in God’s way and time 
—-and in ample time—the mystery will be revealed, the 
insoluble will come to us solved. Ah! and it will not 
hurt us, nor hurt the truth to have some few questions 
left to be carried on when we go hence. The unfold- 
ing revelation of truth and its practice will engage us 
through the eternities. Here are the things hid with 
Christ in God; here are the great discoveries of our 
immortality. All doubt that this shall be our lot, I te 
forever doubt! 


XI 
THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 


HE sixth verse of the third chapter of First 

Corinthians is the perfect expression of the 

genius of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. “TI 
have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the 
increase.”’ We have here every man to his own, with 
each man’s personality functioning one hundred per 
cent. and with God, who is finally responsible, in full 
command. It is the genius of the Gospel that it does 
not standardise personality—that it releases person- 
ality. Paul remains Paul, Apollos remains Apollos, 
one continues to plant, the other continues to water, 
but each has now a Commander-in-chief who leads him 
to his own particular sphere of service and, at last, to 
his supreme height of achievement. 

Who was the more important—Paul or Apollos? 
What a futile question! Which is more important, the 
left wheel of a vehicle or the right—one’s upper teeth 
or lower? We should get along only with difficulty 
without either! And what a gift it is in men and 
women to recognise their peculiar limitations as well 
as their particular talents. Paul knew that his gift 
was pre-eminently in his ability to lay foundations, 
to begin churches, and he knew also, that Apollos’ 
eloquence, with his deep insight into the meaning 
of the Scriptures—all enriched by Alexandrian cul- 
ture—was pre-eminently fitted to build upon those 
foundations, to strengthen the faith of wavering 


112 


THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 113 


Christians and to inspire the early churches to go 
forward. 

Much of the failure and more of the half-success of 
life, results from the inability or unwillingness of peo- 
ple to understand and accept themselves at their face 
value. There are so many Pauls trying to water and 
so often Apollos makes a mess of the planting. Have 
you ever been invited to inspect some monstrosity on 
canvas, over which some admiring friend or relative of 
the eager artist, whose hand may have been designed 
to guide a plow or till a field, but never to paint one, 
waits for you to break into rapture? I recall such an 
occasion when having stood speechless and chagrined 
for a minute that seemed like an hour, I at last cried: 
“How could he do it? ”’—and escaped. Afterwards I 
learned that my remark was a treasured tribute. 

_ There are worthy things in this world for us all to 
do, but no man can do all things worthily—even Paul 
could not. The secret of success here is in knowing 
your name. If your name is Apollos, do not make the 
mistake of responding when Paul is called. You will 
be needed, imperatively needed, but later—after the 
planting. 

Paul, who had so great a place, certainly could not 
take the place of God, nor could he supersede Apollos 
in the sphere of an inspired and inspiring instructor 
and leader of wavering Christians. There are times 
when one’s admirers tempt a man to think otherwise, 
but the truth, “ Every man to his own,” is written 
often and large across the pages of history. Conceit 
is more frequently a liability than an asset and over- 
praise is a hindrance—not a help. 

There is a blind devotion to one’s own fancied quali- 
ties that often becomes as extreme and ridiculous as 


114 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the super-loyalty of some well-meaning, misguided 
friends. ‘‘ Let the cobbler stick to his last,” when not 
misapplied is a wise saying for every generation. 

‘‘ Every man to his own ” well expresses the genius 
of the Gospel. Speaking of two famous New York 
ministers a decade ago, a college president who had 
been asked the question, “‘ Which of the two is the 
greater preacher? ” replied, ““ You cannot answer the 
question. I hear one and he comforts me—restores my 
peace of mind and soul. I leave his church saying—he 
is the greater. And then I hear the other and he chal- 
lenges me, girds me for the battle of life. I leave his 
church saying—he is the greater.” One to comfort 
and another to challenge and God to give the increase! 
Of course, without God to give the increase, the rest 
would not greatly matter. 

The application of the principle of our text to busi- 
ness and trade has brought about the efficiency 
standard. Even big business finds it worth while to 
distinguish between Paul and Apollos and to recognise 
each. Tradition has it that Paul was a short, stooped 
man, while Apollos was tall and cast in lines of grace 
and beauty. In Henry Ford’s automobile institution, 
Paul and Apollos would be given entirely different 
assignments. I have watched that amazing continuous 
belt from which the cars are assembled as it travels on 
and on. Perhaps you have watched it as I have. You 
remember the tall man who, standing erect adjusted 
the steering wheel and the short man who, with the 
minimum of bending, tightened the hubs and. the 
knuckles. ‘‘ Every man to his own! ” Moses to lead 
and Aaron to talk! Paul to plant and Apollos to water. 

Witness the demonstration of this principle in the 
home—the father carrying the heavier physical load— 


THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 115 


unless he is an Indian of certain tribes, or worse! —and 
the mother entering the more intimate places of service 
that few fathers ever see, but both ministering to- 
gether—supplementing, strengthening each other; 
building together the structure of love neither alone 
could rear. 

Now Paul and Apollos, who were so different, had 
certain things in common and so were able to work 
together toward a common goal. The two men in the 
Ford plant had as their objective another Ford which 
could not be achieved with the assignment of either 
man unfinished. The father and mother dream their 
dreams of their daughters’ happiness and their sons’ 
success. Their dream, I say and theirs—not hers nor 
his it is. And so Paul and Apollos had something in 
common—two things in common—the Kingdom of 
Jesus Christ and their dedication, their consecration 
to it. Because of their consecration, the utter abandon 
of their devotion, the flaming completeness of their 
loyalty, God gave the increase to their joint labours. 
And to such consecration God will always give the 
increase. Upon such a surrender of life and talent He 
will always bestow His finishing power. 

This genius of the Gospel accounts for the humble 
and simple who become mighty and for the mighty 
who become mightier. Let a boy of the Massachusetts 
farm, uncouth and without an education, consecrate 
himself to the passion of Jesus and God transforms him 
as completely as he transformed Saul of Tarsus. 
Dwight L. Moody emerged from physical and mental 
poverty to become one of the greatest figures in the 
Christian Church. His evangelistic message still rings 
through the world and a quarter of a century after. his 
death the unique educational institutions he founded 


116 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


remain as his living monument. And it was this same 
Gospel, swelling in mighty spiritual harmonies through 
the esthetic soul of Wesley, who carried with him the 
finest scholarship traditions of Oxford—Wesley, an- 
other Apollos, that set the dead formalism of the 
eighteenth century singing “I know that my Re- 
deemer lives.” 

Give to God the consecration of the life, the dedica- 
tion of the all—however humble or however exalted, 
and He will surely supply the increase. Withhold the 
consecration, deny the dedication and Saul is lost 
somewhere on the road to Damascus while Apollos 
remains a scholarly nonentity in Alexandria. 

The Gospel needs you and only you to redeem the 
world. You—your voice, your influence—your money. 
Yes, but more, You—that ultimate personality that 
makes you different; that makes Paul Paul, Apollos 
Apollos, and you you. It is the genius of the Gospel 
that you need become no other man or no other woman 
to plant with Paul, to water with Apollos, to evangelise 
with Moody, to sing with Wesley, or to serve some- 
where else in the place your talent, your personality fit 
you for as they fit you for no other where. All the 
tasks of the world are to be done and to do them will 
require all kinds of people. In the genius of the Gospel 
the only man who cannot is the man who will not. 

Apollos is the Scriptural example of learning conse- 
crated and alive with spiritual enthusiasm. The idea 
is abroad that scholarship is always unbelieving, or at 
least vigourously sceptical—that great thinkers are 
great doubters. The conclusion must be based upon 
a very superficial survey of life and history. The 
Gospel of Jesus Christ has in every generation laid 
hold upon learned men. Apollos is an example, but he 


THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 117 


is not an exceptional or isolated case. Both he and 
Paul were mighty men of wisdom and invariably they 
were heard with as much consideration by the Literatti 
of their day as by the uneducated rabble. It is the 
exception to the rule when the Intellectual denies. He 
is more often a mystic than not. Even Darwin, as he 
went deeper into the field of his theory, found himself 
swinging more and more back to his early faith. One 
of the greatest surgeons of our time, Dr. Howard 
Kelly, of Johns Hopkins—there is no greater name in 
the medical world—superintends a Rescue Mission 
and joins in the Creed we ourselves repeat. Presi- 
dent Harper, of the University of Chicago, one of the 
fathers of our modern university system, died with his 
hand in the hand of his friend, Frank Gunsaulaus, 
whispering “ Now I lay me down to sleep.” 

It is a little wisdom that makes for conceit—more 
wisdom increases the measure of humility. We need 
never fear knowledge—that which is mistaken for 
knowledge often does great damage. Emerson, refer- 
ring to the elusive character of wisdom, said—and who 
of American scholars was more genuinely wise?— 
“‘ Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently 
wise man, but men capable of wisdom who, being put 
into certain company or other favourable conditions, 
become wise for a short time as glasses rubbed acquire 
electric power for a while.” 

True wisdom, as in the case of Apollos, always lays 
down the Service test. A worker of the Christian 
Church died after twenty-five years of ministry in one 
of New York’s famous rescue missions. At his funeral 
the statement was made that his training and ability 
would have given him success in any popular pulpit. 
He deliberately went to the slums, buried himself 


118 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


among his social and intellectual inferiors, because he 
believed that God had for him there a peculiar oppor- 
tunity. He followed in the footsteps of that other 
intellectual who removed from the classical halls of 
Alexandria to the humble shops of Ephesus. Wisdom 
has always the ability to adapt itself to conditions. 
Apollos, who was at home with the aristocracy of the 
intellect, was equally at home with tent-makers and 
weavers of linen. He was happier, I am sure, because 
among them he found his life work. 

It is this Service principle that lifts inferiors to 
wisdom’s higher plane. Apollos threw off nothing of 
his own culture when he deserted the atmosphere of 
the university, but using everything he had mastered, 
he drew others upward from their low estate. What 
you use you cannot lose—it is in idleness that wisdom 
decays. Wisdom must advance or be overtaken by 
tradition and superstition—it must serve or perish. 
Apollos had the wisdom that grows in grace. He began 
his spiritual life at the baptism of John, but went 
gloriously on into the fuller knowledge of an intimate 
personal experience with Jesus Christ. 

A striking illustration of wisdom’s adaptability came 
to me in a most unexpected place. By the ruins of a 
prehistoric city on a desert of the Southwest, I found 
a trader who had never attended a public school or 
any other beyond the grammar-grades, but who had 
an unusually fine library and who was versed in 
archeology. He knew intimately the Toltec and the 
Aztec theories, and had made a personal study of all 
the ruins for miles about. On his shelves were im- 
plements and weapons of the Stone Age and he was 
following closely the daily story from Carter’s excava- 
tions in the Valley of the Kings. I was not satisfied 


THE GENIUS OF THE GOSPEL 119 


until I learned his secret. For seven years a Fellow 
of the London Society of Archeology had spent his 
summers in that region. The trader had sold him 
supplies, had talked and tramped with him. And that 
man of scholarly distinction, far from despising the 
lesser mind, complimented it by opening his own rich 
store of learning to its eager emptiness. The trader 
received a seven years’ post graduate course in arche- 
ology that any student of that science might well envy, 
and the scientist from London became as completely 
at home in the desert as in his class room and club, 
because he had true wisdom. Learning had made him 
wise and he made his learning serve—serve unselfishly. 
From London to the desert—from Alexandria to Ephe- 
sus—is the way of wisdom and in the genius of the 
Gospel that way is still open to every man. 

Yes, in the genius of the Gospel there is a message 
and opportunity for every person—for Paul and for 
Apollos, for Moody and Wesley, for the Rescue Mis- 
sion worker, for the great educator, for the far- 
journeying scientist and for us all. The Gospel will 
lay hold upon and use any man who wills that it should. 
Adapting itself to his personality and powers, it will 
use him, it will possess him, it will minister through 
him. And beyond all this it is the genius of the 
Gospel that where no faultless sword is available, or 
where the blue steel fails, it snatches up a broken 
blade and triumphs. 

It has been well said that Christianity is exclusive. 
Exclusive it is, but not as the American government is 
exclusive, and must be in its present immigration pol- 
icy. In Christianity the exclusion act is the choice of 
the individual. ‘‘ Whosoever will may come” is the 
great enabling declaration of Jesus Christ. Only those 


120 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


who will not, cannot. ‘ Whosoever will may come ”— 
all peoples, and all conditions,—come without preju- 
dice to racial characteristics, come without offense to 
the personality of the least or poorest—-Come—come 
—to the exaltation and fulfilment of every worthy 
attribute of body, mind and soul. 


“*Whosoever will’—the promise is secure; 
“Whosoever will’—forever must endure; 
“Whosoever will’—tis life for evermore— 

“Whosoever will’ may come.” 


XII 
ON GUARD! 


NE of the great verses of Holy Writ which 
() implies, at once, that there is something of 

value to be protected and that there are dan- 
gers or enemies to be guarded against runs thus: 
“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are 
the issues of life.” 

Some things have no value, or value only under 
certain conditions. It is not necessary to throw 
guards about the sands of the Sahara desert, but the 
writer is acquainted with a family the foundation of 
whose fortune was laid in a vast sandhill of Long 
Island. The salt water of the Atlantic has no night 
watchman and needs none, but fresh water to a ship- 
wrecked company afloat upon its mighty bosom 
becomes more precious than diamonds. 

Always, as values increase, dangers to them increase 
and their guards must be multiplied. Before the War 
I rode across the continent many times, but never saw 
a soldier at a single bridgehead. During the War 
every vital river span was under the gleaming eye of 
the searchlight by night and during the day was held 
constantly in the scarcely less penetrating gaze of the 
military patrol. 

Some things there are that have universal value— 
value that does not change with circumstances, that 
does not vary with the seasons, that is the same in any 
location. Sand is sand in the Sahara and dollars in 


121 


122 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


New York. Fresh water is free to the roving Indian 
and priceless to a famished crew in mid-ocean. But 
my heart is worth no more to me here than it is in 
Africa, but quite as much in my youth as in my age, 
for not for an hour anywhere could I live without it. 

Apply this lesson of universal value to Society. 
What does it mean to you, to me—to us? Some things 
there are in society, some values that are universal— 
free speech, education, safety for life and property and 
all that may be properly included in the word freedom. 
These things are as important to the poor man as to 
the rich man—they are as priceless on the Pacific 
Coast as on the Atlantic. And exceedingly important 
it is for us all to remember that these things, which in 
their intrinsic worth and universal character belong to 
all, cannot be denied by one group to any other group 
without setting in motion the infallible processes of the 
law of compensation. Eventually the group denying 
to others universal values finds itself denied. 

I once heard a wise man say, who had been criticised 
in the British House of Commons because he insisted 
that war objectors be allowed to speak on in Hyde 
Park: “I don’t care particularly about thes protec- 
tion and I hate what they say, but I do care particu- 
larly about my protection when J say what I believe.” 

The French Revolution, with its attendant horrors, 
illustrates fully this principle. For generations roy- 
alty recognised the right, though it may seldom have 
exercised it, of riding down the common people and 
eventually we find the proverbial worm turning and 
riding down royalty. A more recent, and even more 
terrible, illustration is Russia. On the other hand 
William Penn recognised the fact that even a naked 
Indian had as complete a claim on justice as a beruffled 


ON GUARD! 128 


King and while other Crown colonies suffered massacre 
and famine, the Quakers flourished and were safe. 
Some things there are in society, some values that are 
universal—that belong to all. 

These universal values, society is responsible for 
conserving and protecting. We are listening to a great 
deal of wild talk again about “ blue laws ’”—and the 
efforts being made in Legislatures to strengthen the 
bulwarks about the American Sabbath are receiving 
the customary newspaper strictures and misrepresen- 
tations in our press. But when we no longer rise to 
be counted for the seventh day of worship and rest, 
the thing we call American Democracy will be riding 
hard toward political and spiritual Bolshevism. The 
American Sabbath belongs to us all! It has had an 
immeasurable part in making us what we are as a 
people. He who weakens it, whatever his motive, 
weakens the State. He who fails by sound and reason- 
able practice to observe and defend it, denies his 
birthright. 

And more and more I am coming to feel that Chris- 
tians must have a greater sense of obligation for pro- 
moting the essential unity of their faith. The prayer 
of Jesus that we all might be one, was no idle utter- 
ance; it is one of those universal spiritual gifts to man. 
The words flowed in a stream of molten agony from 
His lips. Too little have we ever done to fulfill them. 
The spectacle of distress we present today before a 
uniting and increasingly insolent pagan world is an 
indictment and a warning. Not by any mere effort to 
bring denominations into one ecclesiastical government 
—an effort that often results in yet more offensive 
divisions—can we meet the crisis. But, if we would 
hold our outposts, strengthen our strongholds and 


124 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


move forward to complete our heaven-given assignment 
making of the kingdoms of the earth the kingdom of 
our Lord and His Christ, we must perfect in Christen- 
dom a spiritual unity that will make the words: “ Like 
a mighty army moves the Church of God,” more than 
a poet’s fancy and a marching-song. 

The notable Washington missionary conference, the 
splendid federated efforts in our own and other cities; 
the uniting of the churches in the American Bible 
Society and in similar agencies, to maintain the world 
wide supremacy of the Holy Scriptures; the Sunday 
School and Christian Endeavour and Y. M. C. A. 
movements and hundreds of others, are prophecies of 
a great and triumphant day. 

Each individual has immediate responsibility for 
“ keeping,” for protecting certain things of value. His 
land and his property appear first, though these are 
not the most important by any means. But they may 
be seen with the naked eye and, after all, the individual 
who professes to despise material values seldom has an 
intelligent regard for spiritual. I have observed that 
the farmer who keeps his fence corners clean and has 
a frank pride in good crops, makes a better trustee, or 
deacon, or elder, than the ploughman who leaves his 
implement to rust in the weather. 

The worth in anything should be regarded by the 
person who possesses it, and for any individual to 
neglect the powers that lie latent within him to lift 
him to a higher temporal estate is a sin of omission. 

But there are more intimate values that as an indi- 
vidual I am charged with keeping safely,—my body, 
my mind, my character. How peculiarly mine they are 
—my body, my mind, my character. How often the 
man who highly regards many lesser matters neglects 


ON GUARD! 125 


or ignores them. Jesus had a tremendously high re- 
gard for the body—He knew that some day His would 
be a torch uplifted to the world. He said of yours and 
of mine, “ It is the temple of the Holy Ghost.” 

“ He who steals my purse steals trash; but he that 
filches from me my good name robs me of that which 
not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.” And 
yet there are many people who keep their gold in strong 
boxes and their securities in vaults of steel and cement 
but who trust their good name, which may have come 
down to them by a long line of sacrifice and high 
service, to moral adventurers and the companionship 
of social parasites. 

Character should never be treated as a hot-house 
plant, but it is equally fatal to leave it without atten- 
tion in a weed-infested field. ‘“‘ The greatest thing in 
the world is man, and the greatest thing in man is 
mind,” I heard a lecturer say in my undergraduate 
days. But to see the trash that a multitude crowd into 
their minds causes one to seriously question whether 
the rank and file of us really believe it. ‘‘ Guard well 
thy thought—our thoughts are heard in Heaven,” said 
a wise man—and what a commotion would occur in 
any audience were our thoughts to be heard by our 
fellows! But it is eternally true that 


“Were I so tall to reach the pole, 
Or grasp the ocean with my span, 
I must be measured by my soul— 
The mind’s the standard of the man!” 


Yes, these are the greater values of life! These 
are the treasures that cannot be replaced! Here we 
must stand fast and let no enemy pass. And these are 


126 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the things that have their centre and home in the heart 
—the heart out of which the Proverb maker declares 
are the issues of life. 

Our children, our loved ones, our friends, take their 
stand with these sacred matters. They may be seen 
and heard and felt as any temporal possessions. They 
have their identity in form and matter, but chiefly they 
are spiritual in their contacts with us. All our relation- 
ships with them centre in that divinity which is called 
personality. Nor is it necessary to do more than re- 
mind you that the moral catastrophe upon which a son 
may come is as a deadly thrust through the heart of 
the father, even as a son’s triumph is his parents’ rich- 
est reward. Guard your children as you would guard 
your own life then—for your life they are. Aye, and 
guard them with your life is the law of heaven. “ Keep 
them from evil,’ was the prayer of Jesus for His dis- 
ciples. “ Keep them from evil” by clean example, by 
resolute discipline, by inspiring confidence. ‘‘ Keep 
them from the evil” and ‘“ make them fit to live” is 
the well nigh omnipotent supplication of fathers and 
mothers who trust in God and are doing their part! 

The location of a guard is a very important matter. 
Bridge patrols were not stationed in the center of a 
span, though their eyes were over its entire length. 
They were always located at the approaches. If you 
would keep your heart with all diligence, you must 
guard its entrances,—eyes and ears and all the senses. 
You can never give your heart immunity from the evil 
things of this hectic hour by challenging your eyes with 
neurotic pictures; your ears with Freudian conversa- 
tion and your mind with superficial, morally juvenile, 
sex literature. Guards must be placed at the exits, too! 
Idle gossip, easy half-slander, jealousy and littleness in 


ON GUARD! 127 


dealing with your friends—these are destroying ene- 
mies that when they leave the heart behind, leave only 
aching ruin there. 

The heart is, always, either a garden or a graveyard. 
Everything allowed to enter undergoes the subtle pro- 
cesses of change. The values increase or decrease. 
We become daily better or worse. A mighty grief 
enters—shall it remain to harden and blight, or as a 
ministry of pain? A cruel deception thrusts itself 
within the guard—shall it be allowed to die, or nour- 
ished, shall it live and burn? For each one of us it is 
to say. Whether our lives are happy or sad, suspi- 
cious or victorious is very largely a matter of our own 
choice and election. Ours it is to name that which 
shall survive and flourish and that which shall be for- 
gotten and die. We tend a garden or keep a tomb. 
Ours it is, [ say—We tend and we keep. But always 
we may have “ God with us.” His seat is in the heart 
and His throne “ He will keep in perfect peace, whose 
mind is stayed on Him! ” 

Long ago a college lad began praying “‘ O God, keep 
me clean.” Years passed and he came to testify that 
his prayer, which was the expression of his deep desire, 
though often sudden passions may have swept him with 
gales of temptation, kept God continuously at his call. 
He declares that to feel the Divine strength at hand 
when he needed that arm of power, became inevitable 
—that when he met a moral foe, he was never alone! 

“Out of the heart are the issues of life.” ‘This is 
the reason for our supreme care, this is the reason we 
guard the heart with all diligence,—out of it are the 
issues of life. Not out of the head are the issues of 
life—not out of the head—but out of the heart. The 
most searching question is not, “ Is thy head right with 


128 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


God? ” but “ Is thy heart right with God? ” The great 
concern of Jesus Christ was not for the body, nor for 
the mind of man, but for the seat and centre of his life 
—the heart. He fed the hungry with fish and bread; 
He complimented even as He dwarfed the most schol- 
arly intellects of His day, but it was for the immortal 
soul of the humblest as well as the highest, that he 
poured out his life to the uttermost. 

Again and again history finds the head in full retreat 
when the heart takes command and wins a great vic- 
tory. It was the heart of Leonidas and of his three 
hundred immortal Spartans that held Thermopyle. 
His head counted a million enemies, numbered ten 
thousand chariots, and measured a sure disaster, but 
his heart cried only for the safety of Sparta, and he 
died with his heart in full command, a true son of the 
Lion. It was the heart of Isabella that equipped a 
fleet for Columbus, and it was the heart of that intrepid 
mariner that sailed her fleet from the Gates of Hercules 
to San Salvador. 

The head of Jesus Christ hid the wisest mind that 
ever measured matters, human and divine, but it was 
His heart that broke to save the world and through 
that breach came for us the issues of life. 

No great task has ever been accomplished anywhere 
in the world without an inspired leadership and an 
enthused, soul-challenged and commanded following. 
Cold logic could have demonstrated the injustice and 
unwisdom of the Stamp Act. The minds of Washing- 
ton and Franklin and the Adamses were completely en- 
gaged with the minds of all those others who together 
made the period of our American Revolution an age of 
intellectual giants, before resentment issued in battle 
and battle in final victory. But it was the heart of the 


ON GUARD! 129 


ragged Continental and not the head that fought from 
the Cambridge Elm to Yorktown. It was the heart 
of Patrick Henry and not the head that cried: ‘‘ Give 
me liberty or give me death,” and swept the old Do- 
minion to the side of Massachusetts. It was the heart, 
in spite of the head, that sent George Washington away 
from his riches to accept the command of the Conti- 
nental armies. The Declaration of Independence is 
the supreme document of freedom’s heart. 

Nothing short of the heart appeal can ever call up 
in men the highest, the noblest sentiments. Tell me 
that ten thousand children starve in China and ten 
thousand is a problem for my mind, but the face of a 
single famished child is a picture for my innermost 
being. We weep and give and sacrifice not because 
we have counted ten thousand, but because we have 
felt the anguish of one of the least of Christ’s little 
ones. 

Do you remember the war emotions of seven or eight 
years ago? What organ of your being was in command 
of you when you kissed your son good-bye? Up from 
America’s heart marched four million men and boys 
and never shall a post-war cynicism and shallowness 
blind me to that fact. 

As the years pass the words and message of Lincoln 
take on an added lustre from the immortality of their 
truth and beauty. And who does not say that their 
supreme enduring quality is the genius of their all- 
embracing sacrificial love! Out of the heart, out of the 
heart and from nowhere else, issues Lincoln’s glowing, 
deathless glory. 

Always man’s greatest intelligence is the intelligence 
of his heart. He knows vastly more of reality by faith 
than he does by arithmetic. Heart wisdom is his near- 


130 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


est approach to omniscience and there are times when 
with both women and men this knowledge becomes an 
intuition that reaches well within the veil. 

Where are your richest treasures? Not in the bank, 
—but let me again say, do not despise those. I would 
have no person offer even a half-excuse for the riot of 
waste and the lack of thrift so often distinguishing our 
modern life. But where are your richest treasures? 

Thank God they are in the heart. I stood beside a 
man who looked tenderly and long into the now quiet 
face of a beautiful and brilliant woman. Her pen had 
written books; her mind had graced and directed im- 
portant assemblies; her life had been an open record 
of helpfulness in a great city, but I heard the man by 
my side say: “‘ I do not remember your books and your 
honours today; I only remember that once your arms 
were about my neck, that once your lips pressed mine. 
I only remember that you were my mother! ”—-Where 
are your richest treasures! Ah, guard the heart with 
all diligence, for there lies your imperishable fortune. 

Fail to guard the heart, and life no longer issues. 
Neglect that gate, and death sweeps by. One of the 
great settlement workers of the past generation, ad- 
dressing the first Life Extension Institute held in 
America, said ‘‘ Watch your heart.’ He went on to 
tell us that in youthful ignorance he had laid the basis 
for physical trouble that would inevitably send him to 
an early grave. His prophecy was vindicated by his 
death in New Orleans two weeks later. ‘‘ Watch your 
heart ”—for out of it are the physical issues of life. 
Some of us who weep to see a horse drawing an over- 
load, constantly throw down impossible burdens upon 
our faithful, but always human vital organ. 

Guard the heart of America. That task unfinished, 


ON GUARD! 131 


so bravely begun by those who gave their last full 
measure of devotion, will never reach completion, and 
Lincoln’s dream and prophecy will fail, unless we who 
have come after, guard the gate and keep the sacred 
things of freedom. Let not one free institution be sur- 
rendered or weakened. A free press and a free speech, 
and a free school, a free Church and a free State, and 
always Liberty with law, these stand at the centre of 
the innermost being of our national life. He who 
strikes at all, or one, strikes into the vitals of American 
democracy. 

But there is a matter yet more vital than these— 
more vital than physical existence is to a man, more 
vital than any national destiny—the life and immor- 
tality of the soul. 


“The stars shall fade away, the sun himself 
Grow dim with age and Nature sink in years; 
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, 
Unhurt amidst the war of elements, 

The wrecks of matter and the crash of worlds.” 


Here lies something more precious than mere phys- 
ical existence—more priceless than any national des- 
tiny. The Greece of Homer is a fable, the Egypt of 
the Ptolemies a shrunken mummy, the Rome of the 
Cesars a crumbling Coliseum, and ages yet unborn 
may one day look upon the faded banners of Britain 
and read the tradition that was once America, but Paul 
lives! Lincoln lives! Jesus Christ lives, and His 
kingdom shall not pass away. 

Keep your heart for you shall live for ever! Guard 
it from the sinister foes of avarice and lust and spir- 
itual neglect. Hold fast the gate that opens to your 


132 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


soul. Let only truth pass there. And you will need a 
stronger hand and will than yours to bar the way. To 
stand alone is to fall. 


But I know the One whose mighty rebuff 
Will scorn the mightiest crown; 

I know the One who 1s mighty enough 
To cast the mightiest down:— 

And tender ts He, and waiting for thee. 


AIT 


HOW TO HEAR 


kinds of hearers who may be separated into 

two general classes—those who hear, but do not 
hold; and those who both hear and hold, because they 
hear and heed. 

The three hearers of the first group are the way- 
side hearer, the shallow hearer, and the thorn-choked 
hearer. 

The figure of the wayside is a vivid one. In our 
lesson we see a hard worn, much traveled highway; 
a thoroughfare for everything and for all. Nothing 
good and nothing bad is excluded from either the 
traffic or the sowing. And always the good seed is 
trodden down by evil. Then while crushed and help- 
less, before, with the irresistible life of truth, it has 
had a chance to spring up again, it is carried en- 
tirely away. | 

The world is full of wayside hearers; superficial 
listeners who catch a bit of truth as in a daze or 
dream; who retain never more than a hazy recollec- 
tion of what they have heard; whose memory of good 
is faint and futile. ‘Their ears and minds are con- 
gested highways, and always the finer things are being 
crowded into the ditch by some high powered, brutal 
selfishness or sensualism. ‘They hear everything—in 
a way. No thought has feet too hallowed to go track- 
ing through their minds. The tiny portion of that 


133 


A hee Parable of the Sower is a picture of four 


134 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


which is worth while and wholesome has no chance of 
being understood because it is given no attention. 

And the world has as many shallow hearers today. 
They gladly hear, even with exuberant enthusiasm; 
gladly, but not deeply. Their quickly formed impres- 
sions spring up over night like sudden tropical plants. 
But in that first rush of growth they exhaust their 
shallow soil and wither with the sun. These are the 
changeable people who, swept by every wave of doc- 
trine, are never long on any foundation. To them 
religion is a sort of three-ring circus, and they are as 
forever unsettled as a child trying to watch all the 
rings at once. Temporarily they may look like per- 
manent partners, substantial builders in the Church, 
but a slight affront, a trivial grievance, a tiny injury, 
real or fancied, is as the scorching wind to a shallow 
flower. 

Many of them are stirred intellectually or emotion- 
ally, but never more profoundly. They go to a re- 
ligious service to be entertained, or to enjoy a literary 
banquet. However, the important matter for us is not 
to enumerate and analyse these shallow hearers. We 
ourselves have little room, I imagine, to employ the 
tactics of the Pharisee. The important matter for us 
is to observe that the shallow hearer of the truth does 
not survive its tests. He is like the beautiful tree with 
only surface-roots. He goes down before the first wild 
storm of temptation or adversity. He falls as falls the 
willow in an autumn gale. There are people who, like 
plants, promise much in appearance, but render little 
in a real test. Others there are who have no social 
comeliness and few intellectual attainments, but whose 
character stands like a rock in a weary land. 

Particularly pathetic is the thorn-choked hearer. 


HOW TO HEAR 135 


His mind is as rich and deep as the black loam of new 
cleared land. He is stirred by profound emotions. 
He has sound principles and high ideals. He loves the 
good and beautiful. He hates the wrong. Ah! but he 
is busy and harassed and crowded. His mind is essen- 
tially all right, but preoccupied—already filled. The 
finest field in the fairest valley sown to thorns and 
weeds, and then planted with corn, will never produce 
corn. And the mind of a generous, brilliant man given 
over to the cares of this world, or the deceitfulness of 
riches and the lust of other things, will never return a 
harvest of Christian peace and power. 

The deceitfulness of riches! They promise comfort, 
happiness and honour. More often they return dis- 
tress, bitterness and shame. They are constantly 
tempting men and women, tempting men and women 
to make them an end in themselves, when they are only 
good for the good they support. Inevitably they carry 
with them the menace of selfishness and suspicion and 
the tyranny of things. They cannot buy Heaven. 
They cannot buy health. They cannot buy happiness. 
It is when given their proper planting, their right pro- 
portion of place and attention, that they are a blessing 
and not a curse. It is the deceitfulness of riches, the 
abuse of wealth, the misuse of power, that chokes to its 
death the good in any man. 

Cares of this world and the lusts of other things! 
An invalid mother with her daughter and two grand- 
children moved into a country house. The husband 
and son-in-law were much away. Seventeen servants 
were thought to be essential to the comfort of the es- 
tablishment. The house with its paltry twenty rooms 
was hopelessly small. No wonder the mother was an 
invalid and small wonder that the children could never 


186 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


be gotten off to school on time. The garden there may 
have a thousand priceless blooms, but it is a hopeless 
tangle of weeds. | 

New York has given her music-lovers and enter- 
tainment-seekers a notable series of operatic and 
literary triumphs since the war. Never were clean, 
wholesome plays more numerous and never were they 
more notable in their merit. But New York today is 
also a veritable cesspool for theatrical filth. There are 
few foul suggestions for eye and ear that do not stalk 
naked in the name of art across our stage, or smirk 
from the pages of our magazines and books. The 
lewdness of the old frontier was at least honest—ours 
is a lie. Lusts of other things! Small wonder that the 
harvest is husks for much of our twentieth century 
society. But let us stop slandering youth! It is my 
candid opinion that we get more from our youth than 
we deserve; that the good returns are far beyond the 
investment we make. Never did any civilisation have 
a soil as rich as ours in which to plant the seeds of 
religion, patriotism and morality. Never has any na- 
tion known as brave a field in which to sow the promise 
of her destiny. But church and school and state must 
awake and unite to turn back these lusts of other 
things or we shall have a Sahara instead of an Eden. 

Nor let us beguile ourselves with the fancy that the 
menace here is confined to the so-called upper stratum 
of society. In this class of thorn-choked hearers, who- 
ever Jesus may in His time have found there, we dis- 
cover now the poor as often as the rich, the farmer’s 
boy almost as frequently as the millionaire’s son. A 
Ford may not travel as swiftly as a Rolls-Royce, but it 
goes as far. Theatrical obscenity is just about as avail- 
able for Main Street as for Broadway, and the radio, 


HOW TO HEAR 137 


for good or evil, knows no favourites. The lust of 
other things is an universal menace. 

For all of us there are the thorns of doubt and the 
rank weeds of supercilious, superficial philosophy. 
We doubt our country. We doubt our friends. We 
doubt our faith. We doubt God himself, and, doubt- 
ing Him, doubt all. You cannot grow morality, you 
cannot cultivate sound character in doubt-infested soil. 
You may raise up a pallid generation of self lovers. 
You may achieve a society of so-called free social units, 
but you will, if this planting goes on and its harvest 
prevails, wreck both Church and State. 

Ah! but our hope is this second class of hearers. 
Our hope, and it is a living hope, is in those who both 
hear and hold because they hear and heed. Jesus 
named them—‘ Those who bring forth fruits.” 

“Take heed what ye hear ” is the injunction of the 
lesson, and the difference between those who hear and 
do not heed, and those who hear and heed, is the dif- 
ference between barrenness and fruitfulness, the differ- 
ence between defeat and victory. ‘“‘ Take heed what 
ye hear! ” Be careful what you hear! Do not turn 
your mind into a three-ring circus! Have a self- 
respecting intellect! Keep slander, mean gossip, and 
backbiting out. 

Of a certain prominent publicist I heard this story: 
A popular teller of tales—tales good, bad and indiffer- 
ent-—found himself with a group of men in a private 
dining room of a distinguished Fifth Avenue club. 
With an unmistakable inflection he said, beginning an 
eagerly awaited recital, ‘‘ I see that there are no ladies 
present,” to which the publicist in question, with a 
smile, replied, but with an inflection also unmistakable, 
“No ladies, only gentlemen.” Did I hear someone 


138 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


say, ‘‘ But I can’t help what I hear”? Oh, yes, you 
can, and you do! 

Prepare to hear. Read the author’s book before 
listening to his lecture; secure the libretto before at- 
tending the opera; familiarise yourself with the history 
of the country before visiting its capitol, and, by 
reflection and introspection, seek to bring yourself 
into harmony and spiritual oneness with those master- 
pieces from the ages- which the hand of time has 
dropped upon your knees. 

Take time to hear. So much of our hearing today 
is but half hearing, and half hearing is in vital matters 
worse than no hearing. We get our information on 
the run. The concluding words which are the final 
direction are missed. A gentleman spent a futile hour 
awaiting an important dinner conference at the wrong 
hotel because he failed to read the final paragraph of 
a letter. That neglected paragraph told of a change 
in the place of meeting. He had soup at one address, 
and nuts at another, but missed the substantial fare 
that came between. 

Hear with a purpose. Those of you who go to 
church with something definite in mind; those of you 
who go expectantly, resolving in advance to secure 
something helpful, invariably lift your heads after the 
benediction with rewarded minds and thankful hearts. 

Recently a member of this church said, ‘‘ You hit 
me terribly hard tonight, and I did enjoy it! ” And 
the preacher replied, ‘‘ Well, they were glancing blows, 
for they hit me first! ” 

Hear with a purpose. You may be disappointed in 
the sermon, but the music will never fail you, and 
always you may hear the voice of God and feel His 
spirit. 


HOW TO HEAR 139 


“Take heed what ye hear!” And now cut off the 
first word. Drop the ‘“ take” and we have the heart 
of the whole matter. ‘“‘ Heed what ye hear!” Obey! 
Govern your life accordingly. The proof of your 
hearing is your acting. The promise of a tree may be 
its buds, blossoms and leaves, but its vindication is 
its fruit. 

I can hear my father’s penetrating voice calling up 
the attic stairs—‘ Daniel, get up! ”—not once, but 
often, and then a little later and much more impres- 
sively—“ Daniel, are you up?” That first signal was 
not the crucial matter. With me it was never suffi- 
cient. I would invariably fall asleep again, and very 
likely insist that I had not been called at all. 

On last Columbus Day, for the first time in my life, 
unless the tragedy may have happened in the night 
while I slept, I rode upon a train that destroyed a 
human life. It was at a crossing with an alarm bell 
in full cry; a crossing over an absolutely straight and 
unobstructed stretch of track. We do not know, for 
the poor fellow never spoke, but surely he must have 
heard. “ Heed what ye hear! ” 

A splendid youth stands before Jesus. He has the 
presence and the trappings of a ruler. His face is 
clean, his eye is honest, and his voice rings eager and 
true—‘‘ Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal 
life?’ And the One who spoke as never man spoke, 
replied, “‘ Go; sell all that thou hast, and give to the 
poor.” Does he hear? Yes, face to face they stand, 
close together. Yes, he hears. ‘ Go; sell all that thou 
hast, and give to the poor.” What is the answer? 
Silence for nineteen hundred years. The rich young 
ruler’s failure was not in his ears, but in his heart. He 
had ears to hear, but lacked the will to heed. 


140 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and thy neighbour as thyself,’ the Great 
Teacher had said to this youth of the ruling class, 
and proudly the well-favoured lad had replied that so 
he had done. He had heard and intellectually he had 
assented from his earliest age of responsibility, but 
when the test of action was laid down, the demonstra- 
tion of sacrifice required, he did not heed. ‘“ Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy-God with all thy heart, and thy 
neighbour as thyself.””’ And what is our answer? Too 
often the strike, the lock-out, the race-riot and inter- 
national misunderstandings that are a menace to world 
peace. ‘‘ Heed what ye hear! ” 

“Heed what ye hear! ” “ Thou shalt not kill,” I 
hear him say—nor will I ever believe that Jesus meant 
that to apply to individuals and not to states; that He 
condemned private murder and remained silent on 
collective killings! ‘‘ Thou shalt not kill!” For 
nineteen hundred years the sons of men have heard 
the thunder of that word; for nineteen hundred years 
the Christmas chimes have rung the anthem that the 
Bethlehem angels sang. For nineteen hundred years 
the Christian Church has bowed before His manger 
and His cross and called Him ‘ Prince of Peace” as 
well as ‘Lord of lords.” Ah, but ‘‘ Heed what ye 
hear,’ and the answer is new battleships, and fresh 
levies, poison gas more nearly perfect, and weapons 
of destruction yet more deadly. ‘‘ Heed what ye 
hear ’”—and what is the answer? 


Armies marching to and fro, 

Clang of steel and crash of blow, ‘ 
Brother laying brother low— 

Still His blood cries from the ground 


HOW TO HEAR 141 


From Golgotha’s reeling mound, 
For the world’s great open wound. 


“Thou shalt not kill!” What is the answer? And 
the answer is that if the Church of Jesus Christ would 
follow in His train, she must heed as well as hear; 
she must in these stupendous moral matters lead 
the State. } 

Out of this chaos of denial a supreme principle 
emerges. It finds its perfect expression in the words 
of the Roman-born Jewish tentmaker. ‘“ The wages 
of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life 
through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” The wages of sin 
is death. Let no man doubt it, and God pity the 
nation that denies it. God pity that nation, for not 
even God can save her. The wages of sin is death, 
and the grinning skeletons of Nineveh and Tyre need 
not a voice to confirm it. The wages of sin is death, 
but the gift of God is eternal life. Heed what ye 
hear! Heed, for obedience to law is liberty, and God’s 
word is final law. 

Abraham heard; heard in the morning mists of 
society’s first dawn; heard that voice which, having 
heard, he never more would leave behind. ‘ Get thee 
out of thy country and from thy kindred and from 
thy father’s house unto a land that I will show thee.” 
Abraham heard to heed, and westward the course of 
empire began to take its way. Westward religion. 
began its journey to find the city which hath founda- 
tions whose maker and builder is God. 

Moses heard; heard the voice in the desert; could 
not mistake it, for it had a tongue of flame and was 
living fire. And Moses heard to heed. Out of Egypt 
he led Israel. Through the Red Sea and the wilder- 


142 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


ness he guided her. Beyond the Jordan he saw the 
ground where Jehovah Himself would plant His seed 
and multiply His race. 

Paul heard; heard the cry from Macedonia—‘* Come 
over and help us,” and Paul heard to heed. Over he 
came and with him came to earth’s last frontier the 
mercy and the power of the Cross. 

And Jesus Himself was subject to this sovereign 
principle. Jesus, who_was with the Father from the 
beginning, who knew perfectly the divine mind, Jesus 
heard. He understood the will of Heaven. In Him 
it became articulate when He cried, “ And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” 
But thus to hear and to know was not enough. In the 
deep darkness and darker mystery of lonely Geth- 
semane, God’s Son must, as the humblest man of us, 
accept the cup and Cross of obedience. 

Above the olive trees, as Roman soldiers come with 
spears and torches, and drowsy friends start up to 
beat them back, I seem to catch the echo of the words 
He spoke in happier times beside blue Galilee. “ Heed 
what ye hear.’ He heeds! Out He goes to climb the 
world’s highest hill, to bear the world’s deepest 
wound; to set this world’s brightest signal fire. 

To hear and to heed is to triumph. There is no 
cross without a crown. Obedience to law is liberty, 
and God’s law is omnipotent love. ‘‘ For God so loved 
the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have 
everlasting life.” 


XIV 
IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 


ROM God there is no escape. In all places and 
HR all experiences, whether we welcome Him or 
otherwise, He is present. ‘‘ In sorrow He’s my 
comfort, in trouble He’s my stay,” sang our mothers, 
nor does He avoid the wedding-feast, the council-room, 
and the mart of trade. Conscience is His favourite 
vehicle. It is the testimony of many people seeking 
seclusion and loneliness that always they were closely 
companioned and no man has ever succeeded in finding 
a place remote enough to hide his crime. Recently a 
defaulter, recognised in a Brazilian jungle-town, ex- 
claimed: ‘“‘ The world is too small! ” 

Keams Canyon lies nearly a hundred miles north of 
the beaten path, the old Santa Fé trail, now the road- 
bed of a great trans-continenta! railway system. It 
was the favourite Western gateway of Kit Carson, and 
cuts through the heart of the Navaho land. In the 
centre of it the Government has established an Indian 
school. One day I drew up in front of the agent’s 
office and requested a permit to visit the Hopi villages 
on the “ First Mesa.” The gentleman who granted my 
request was a young man from New York whose par- 
ents are decorators with offices on Lexington Avenue, 
and whose brother-in-law is assistant manager of one 
of our largest hotels. Later in that evening, as I felt 
my way through the darkness, the lights of the car 
swung over a steep rim and down upon an automobile 


143 


144 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


stalled in a tremendous dry-wash. Offering my ser- 
vices to the marooned passengers I found two young 
women, artists from Holland, courageously, if a little 
foolishly, penetrating the Indian country without a 
guide. 

Still later I dined with the trader at Jedito—Ante- 
lope Springs—by the side of an ancient ruin which 
scientists declare to have been the site of a flourishing 
city when the Pyramids were laid down. I found in 
the wife of the trader a Christian Endeavourer from 
Indiana. Yes, the world does seem to be a small place. 

God, we cannot escape. The great and searching 
presence is never away; no trail is long enough to dis- 
tance Him; no spot so hidden that He cannot find us. 
Indeed, He is ever with us, a benediction or an 
indictment. 

But it is almost equally a fact that in the twentieth 
century we cannot escape each other. Recently a 
friend of the writer said: “‘ Well, I shall change my 
summer location, for quiet and seclusion I must have, 
and the automobile has brought me as close to my 
friends as my winter quarters used to be.” ‘There is a 
demand now for passage somewhere, anywhere on ships 
without a radio. A little while ago I came two hundred 
and thirty miles from a railroad, across mountains and 
deserts, into a forest of one million eight hundred thou- 
sand acres; roughly surveyed one hundred miles long 
by sixty miles wide, and almost completely isolated, 
where in moving forward twenty-six miles with my 
companions I counted two hundred and sixty-nine 
deer, where in two days of hunting I found eleven 
“kills ” of mountain lion and watched two beautiful 
bob cats in a pine tree above a fawn they had slain. 
Trails end surely! But the camp radio, only slightly 


IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 145 


disturbed by static, gave us the scores of the interna- 
tional polo games, a bed-time story, and some insuffer- 
able jazz! 

One may travel for miles in the Sahara without 
meeting a living creature unless he has carried him as 
a tiny and unwelcome passenger from the last Arab 
camp and then he has come up with his partner’s 
cousin, or his chauffeur’s brother, at the evening oasis! 
By trails of travel ever shortening, on land and over 
water and through air, we have brought the far and 
near together. Jules Verne’s Around the World in 
Eighty Days has become a very slow book. It takes 
a trip to Mars, or a voyage to the moon, to stir the 
imagination of the present generation. 

The only time we Americans fail to realise the fact 
of the earth’s smallness is when we talk about our iso- 
lation—our remoteness. There may be arguments for 
national aloofness, but we are addle-headed and foolish 
when we use physical isolation and geographical re- 
moteness as one of them. The United States is hours 
nearer any explosion in Europe now than she was when 
the crazy student did his killing in 1914—Even then 
we were too close to keep clear. 

The only question for us to decide—and God knows 
we need all our wisdom and courage along with divine 
assistance to reach the decision, is: ‘“‘ How shall we 
co-operate with the rest of the world for the best inter- 
ests of us all?’ Manifestly we should not expect to 
dictate any plan arbitrarily nor to predicate our final 
action upon the unconditional acceptance by others of 
our own proposition. Internationalism remains an 
adventure—but an adventure of faith and not of fear. 
An adventure, but in a time when not to SE iS 
to invite irretrievable disaster. 


146 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


This is a small world because always all of us are 
close to experiences that are common to us all. We 
are always close to sorrow. Always all of us are close 
to sorrow—our own or others. 


“ There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
But one dead lamb 4s there. 
There is no household, howsoe’er defended, 
But has one vacant chatr.” 


Always, we are close to pain. An old man staggered 
down my car, stooped and cringing. He was on his 
way to Rochester. A dread word on his lips—and 
dread, deep dread, was in his eyes. Pain is always 
sitting next to us, even when we ourselves are for the 
moment free. I think that among the heroes of all 
time are those who have born suffering without despair- 
ing—who have made out of pain a ministry. 

IT have a neighbour who built his great house above 
the Hudson and the Palisades where he could watch 
the sunlight play upon them. Then suddenly his lamp 
flickered and went out. Now I see him standing with 
his face uplifted in the glory that he never more shall 
see, but there is no wail upon his lips. He has the 
glory in his soul. It is not how much you suffer, but 
how. A very courtly and distinguished gentleman who 
has been a great religious leader, a college president, 
and who is now at the head of one of the most powerful 
banks in America, has a knee stiff and solid. But the 
gentleman is so unusual in his character and disposi- 
tion that no one ever retains a memory of his physical 
handicap. I had known him by reputation and 
through mutual friends for years before I ever saw 
him. No one had ever told me nor had I known that 


IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 147 


he was lame. Suffering may make you either miser- 
able or a minister. Pain may serve you ill, or well. 
Some of the great benefactors of man have been great 
and constant sufferers. Some of the finest works of 
genius has been accomplished by those who dipped 
their pens in their own blood. It is never what a man 
feels that makes or breaks him, but how he feels and 
how he acts about it. 

The world is small because we are always close to 
danger. Death hurries by every corner of Manhattan 
and lurks in every subway. Physical danger is always 
near. After a wedding one evening I stepped, with a 
little group, into Fifth Avenue. Out of Thirty-third 
Street a man came running, head down and revolver 
in his hand. Close behind him leaped a dismounted, 
mounted officer—his automatic menacingly ready for 
action; then another officer, and finally the inevitable 
crowd in full cry. The fugitive avoided a legal killing 
by surrendering just across from our church. He had 
staged a hold-up at the rear entrance of the McAlpin 
Hotel. Some of us were fortunate to escape more than 
a thrill! No, it is unnecessary to climb Mount Ever- 
est, or to go in search of some Arctic island to find 
danger. I have just spent weeks in the West—in 
those remote places once referred to as “wild and 
woolly ”—but without seeing a single side-arm! 

Moral danger, too, is always near us,—the tempta- 
tions that lead us to lower our standards and play with 
our faith. The suggestion that we have been good long 
enough and that now is the time to trade the coin of 
old-fashioned wholesomeness for the quick change of 
the devil. Grave, great risks are here—always with 
us. The risk every one of us runs of sacrificing first, 
the best for the better, then the better for the good, 


148 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


and finally the good for worse. A small world it is. 
On one corner a church and behind it a dive. In 
one market the purest milk, the freshest vegetables, 
the cleanest meats—in another food fit for no human 
stomach. 

We deceive ourselves when we think that we can 
make ourselves immune to these dangers, that we who 
seem more fortunate than others, dare ignore them. 

The “richest little-boy in the world,” guarded by 
nurses and surrounded by grooms and servants, went 
laughing down the drive of his father’s Washington 
home one day into the path of a great truck to sudden 
death. Nurses and servants who had not saved him 
carried in his lifeless body. Atlanta, Georgia, a few 
years ago was swept by a smallpox epidemic that had 
its origin in the squalid negro hovels of the city. But 
it did its saddest work, wrought its fiercest ruin, in the 
homes of the ‘‘ better families.” 

The world is a small place, for always one is near 
loneliness. Recently I heard a woman say, “O, if I 
don’t get away from this desert, from this maddening 
silence, I shall scream.’ We more often think of lone- 
liness in association with wide spaces, empty of cities 
and hungry for people. Stories of trappers in the 
North woods, shipwrecked crews on uncharted islands, 
are the ones usually set to music, weird and low. But 
it is my conviction that there is more real loneliness in 
any great city than in any wilderness that today re- 
mains unexplored. I have seen loneliness in New York 
—seen it in the lap of luxury and wealth, as well as in 
the room of the poor—that beggars description and 
surpasses any tale of desert isolation that was ever 
screened. 

This same loneliness has in it one of the greatest of 


IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 149 


all great battles for the lad who comes fresh and eager 
from the farm, and for the girl who leaves her home 
village, ambitious to write her way to fame and for- 
tune. His Satanic majesty’s favourite weapon in these 
crowded tenements and ever-multiplying apartments 
is loneliness. The Church can do few things that are 
of more far-reaching importance to the future of New 
York, the American home and the American nation, 
than to receive, welcome, and companion these youth- 
ful new arrivals. But not only the transient and new 
arrival is lonely in New York. One of the oldest mem- 
bers of our congregation went to her reward during the 
Summer months. She bore an honoured name—the 
name of an old family. The last time that I visited her 
she said: ‘“‘ Relatives and friends are nearly all gone. 
Now no one comes and I cannot go. I am very lonely.” 

But there is another side to the universal picture. 
This is a small world because we are all always so close 
to joy and success. Children are singing about us, 
houses are rising, smiling brides are putting on their 
finery. The strong are building better than we 
dreamed for them. The good things of life are being 
shared. At our very doors the determination of faith 
is making a path out of squalour and ignorance toward 
comfort and achievement. 

And are we not always at the door of opportunity? 
The chance to be needs only the will to achieve, to 
become a fact. The sight of favoured ones should not 
strike us blind to others unfavoured and handicapped 
who, refusing to despair, have claimed the opportunity 
no one else could see for them—those who have exalted 
their life by living it courageously and well. The crip- 
pled grandson of a friend of mine was, in merit and by 
personal popularity, elected president of his class and 


150 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


editor of the high school paper. At Long Beach, in 
California, I saw a legless, handless man writing beau- 
tiful visiting cards. Opportunity is close to us. The 
opportunity to do something generous and fine for an- 
other, to send cheer into the home of anxiety and 
want, to encourage ambitious youth, to put the training 
and experience of ripe years at the disposal of those 
who have not lived so long and who do not know as 
much; the opportunity to use your own good fortune, 
to draw upon your own abundant store for those who 
have come upon a special need and who may face 
defeat. What a small world this is, and what a glad 
world for those who pass through it with open eyes 
and heart. We are always close to deliverance, to 
freedom, to something better. 

Let us remark again that this is a small world 
because always we are close to God in it. He is never 
far from any man. There are times when we are more 
conscious of His presence and some there are who so 
practice His presence as to know constantly His com- 
forting, inspiring, strengthening companionship. But 
always and everywhere, He is near. Whatever man’s 
circumstance, when called upon God will answer him. 
It is not necessary to wait for the daybreak of some 
holy dawn, or to go to some distant shrine to demon- 
strate this fact. He spoke to Moses as, engaged in 
business, Moses watched the flocks of Jethro. He 
spoke to the lad Samuel, in the quiet watches of the 
night, in a voice still and small. ‘ Surely this is the 
gate of Heaven; surely God is here,” the awe-stricken 
disciples whispered on the Mount of Transfiguration. 
And they were right. But He was no less present when 
soldiers drove the nails of agony and shame into the 
Cross through His ministering hands, Always God is 


IS THE WORLD A SMALL PLACE? 151 


“here,” and here for no other purpose than to save and 
heal and bless. 

I say that one need not go far nor cry loudly to find 
God. The Psalmist tells us that He is present to make 
the record when a sparrow falls and of how much more 
importance you are than a sparrow. I have found God 
in the church—in the study of the minister, in the par- 
lours and in the chapel, in the great marble tower and 
in this spacious chamber where His music swells in 
worship and praise, where the word of His Gospel is 
spoken and where men and women and children bow 
before His altar. Aye, and I have found Him in the 
crowded and many-tongued avenues, along the con- 
gested waterfront, in the cathedral-like buildings and 
the parks that lift their trees like supplicating hands 
to the sky out of which comes their sunshine and their 
water of life. 

I love this vast, this overwhelming place. I do not 
think that I should be long happy, now that I have 
come to know her, far from her. Everywhere in her 
I find God—in her toil and in her haste, in her cities 
within the City, larger they are than their old world 
counterparts; in her poverty and undernourishment 
and sin; in her mad abandon to pleasure; in her indus- 
trial strife and her social cruelty—everywhere I find 
God ministering by the hands of men and women; 
serving in great philanthropies and Christian missions; 
healing in hospitals and health centers; educating in 
schools and colleges—making the way of the street 
safer and easier for little children and swinging back 
the doors of brotherhood to usher in Christ’s new era 
of the soul. 

Let this mysterious assurance of God’s presence be 
our final word. If, in the message of the hour, you 


152 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


have come to feel the fact of Him, I shall know that 
you have caught a vision of your better self and are 
going out with a divine urge to make a better life. 

It was my good fortune to come to Zion National 
monument in the marvelous canyon of the Virgin River 
in Utah, one night when there was a full moon. The 
moonlight on those colossal crags and pinnacles pro- 
duced an effect more magical than any dream of 
Arabian Nights. It was as though phantom ships of 
many shapes came sailing out upon a vast, celestial, 
silver sea. Standing before the majestic and illumined 
silence of El Gobernador, I waited for some one to 
voice the sentiment that I had no words to express. It 
was the driver of our party who spoke first, and no 
master of English, no genius of poetic form could have 
said more—‘‘ It makes a fellow want to watch his 
step,” he said. “ Jt makes a fellow want to watch his 
step.” God was there! 


XV 
WINNING OVER WORRY 


RISTOTLE was of the opinion that man has a 
A special emotion which causes him to fret and 

worry when he witnesses unearned prosperity. 
Certainly even the best nature’s manifest at times this 
spirit, nor should any of us be asked to rejoice in 
the rewards that come to certain workers of iniquity. 
But the emotion should be controlled, and so far as 
giving it any of our valuable time is concerned, it is 
properly dismissed with the observation that justice, 
however slow, is exacting and that God is an unfail- 
ing Judge. 

But the admonition: “ Fret not thyself because of 
evil doers,” had a much wider implication than a mere 
reference to a proper attitude to be assumed toward 
““workers of iniquity.” Here is an admonishment 
against worry itself. An admonishment timely and 
imperative, for where is a more devastating curse and 
a weakness more prevalent? “It is not work that kills 
men, itis worry. Work is healthy; you can seldom put 
more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust 
upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys 
the machinery, it is the friction.” ‘Thus spoke Henry 
Ward Beecher, nor did he say half enough. A curse it 
is! A blight upon the one whose breast chambers it 
and upon all who love him. And who of us entirely 
escapes it? How it has set us all busy providing 
against future disturbances that never materialise. 


153 


154 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


How many have laid up treasures against the rainy day 
they never lived to see? How many have sacrificed 
present peace of mind for anticipated disasters in busi- 
ness, home and government which the unfolding years 
have not revealed? 

How many have made life a burden for themselves 
and their friends miserable by labouring today under 
the dreadful happenings of tomorrow, when to live 
today well is the only task God has ever given us? 

A certain bishop kept an entire ship’s company in 
mental turmoil while the vessel went zig-zagging 
through the torpedo zone during the late War, by see- 
ing a periscope in every white cap and an enemy rocket 
in every shooting star. He was sure that his wife and 
children would never see him again! Eventually, 
every person on board was convinced that no one else 
ever wanted to! 

What a worrier Thomas Carlyle is said to have 
been! When he lived in London, a _ neighbour’s 
chickens gave him great annoyance. The male mem- 
ber of the flock was, as always is the case with such 
fellows, particularly unfortunate in his hours of vocal 
exercise. Carlyle remonstrated with the proprietor 
of the bird, who insisted that the rooster seldom 
crowed more than three or four times in a night, to 
which the crabbed old Scot replied, ‘‘ That may be, 
but if you only knew what I suffer waiting for 
him! ” And what we all do suffer waiting, waiting 
for trouble, sorrow, disaster. What men do suffer 
waiting for him. Easy enough for me to laugh at 
Carlyle’s annoying rooster, or the good bishop’s terror 
of the submarines, but what about my bird of worry? 
My submarine of terror? What a terrible bird or 
boat he is! 


WINNING OVER WORRY 155 


We are all in this same demoralizing trouble; let us 
seek to help each other. Very quaintly Edgar Guest 
tells a pathetic, well-nigh unusual story in one of his 
poems: 


“T saw a troubled man today, 
A stranger's face whtch plainly told, 
Some anxious care had come his way, 
It looked so drawn and old. 
* * X* * * 
“And though he would not know my name 
Or guess that I was there, 
I bothered with him just the same 
And made for him a prayer. 


“God help him to be strong, said I, 
God help him to be true, 

In this his hour of doubt, be nigh, 

And bring lim safely through.” 


What is the cause of worry? There are many 
causes, though the greatest of worries come without 
cause—that is, a cause that may be defined. Imagina- 
tion feeds worry. -Vain imaginings stuff them up and 
blow them out until they bob about us like sinister red 
balloons ever threatening to explode and deafen or 
smother us. It was Shakespeare who said, ‘‘ Nothing 
good or bad but thinking makes it so.” 

But many worries may be traced to their source, for 
they do have a basis in fact. Of course the final foun- 
tain of worry is always fear—fear, age-old and coming 
out of the primal woe. Fear, devil-eyed, sneering up 
from the pit—fear, fear of the unknown. And God 
knows that we have enough to stir us to anxiety, to 
give us concern; to goad us into worry—and God pity 


156 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


us, so frequently we turn to the Church and her min- 
istry in vain! 

Some causes of worry are physical. A sudden pain 
clutches your heart, obstructs the great thrust of that 
vital muscle—how you wait for that pain to come 
again! Or, your bank account steadily dwindles and 
no call to work comes—and you begin to count your 
dollars and then your smaller change. You must eat— 
and more important to you, those dependent upon you 
must eat. Ten thousand anxieties there are jostling 
each other about every day that have their centre in a 
loaf of bread, or a pair of shoes, or a ton of coal, or an 
apartment fit to live in. Let no man say that here are 
matters to be lightly regarded and carelessly dismissed. 
As for the rest of us, matters that so intimately relate 
themselves to our fellows belong to us who are more 
fortunate and Heaven shame us when our hearts be- 
come hard and closed! There is an honest, a divine 
concern for others that gives us no rest, no sleep until 
we have done all possible to relieve our brother’s phys- 
ical or his spiritual necessity. 

Have you ever been hungry, hungry for food? Have 
you ever been homeless—with no place to put your 
head down upon a pillow of sleep when the night came? 
Have you ever closed your uncovered, frost-bitten 
fingers about ‘a snow shovel and in a thin coat, facing a 
rising storm of rain and sleet, with a falling tempera- 
ture, tried to win food for yourself and for your chil- 
dren? God break my heart some day, if need be— 
smash it into small pieces—but God forbid that any 
disillusionment, or selfishness, or weakness should ever 
close it! 

And children are a source of worry. What a terror 
the cough of croup sends into the heart of a mother— 


WINNING OVER WORRY 157 


what an anguish the long unexplained absence brings. 
But darker still the nights when sons and daughters 
turn their feet to forbidden paths and unlock the inner 
chambers of their souls to sinister guests. 

Again: scientists tell us that overstrain, physical as 
well as mental, is a mighty encouragement to wrong— 
that the man who drives himself at his desk or in his 
office, who refuses to concede the demands of his body 
and soul for relaxation and refreshment, becomes a 
nervous and haunted host to fears of every sort, an 
irritable and churlish attendant on disaster. 

But the most fruitful source for worry is not sick- 
ness, nor fear of poverty, nor physical weakness nor 
anxiety for others. Sin makes worry faster than all 
things else. The man who is living a wrong life, a life 
that does not square with his intellectual and moral 
standard, a life that violates the ideals he once held, a 
live that covers things double and ugly—that man 
worries! His face in repose will show it, nor will his 
laughter ever be loud enough to drown completely the 
still small voice of an accusing conscience. Sin makes 
worry—sin, gaunt and crude, that smears a ruddy stain 
across a murderer’s hand, or leaves upon a seducer’s 
soul forever the memory of the virtue he made the 
plaything of his lust and the outcast of his vice. Such 
sin is paid for—paid for in the haunted look of the 
fugitive from justice who hears in every footfall the 
tread of an avenger and who sees in every honest face 
the verdict, “‘ Thou art the man!” Sometimes I won- 
der which of two sinners, the vicious and brutal one, 
or the other who carries along with him the refinements 
of culture and the enrichments of art while he indulges 
in practices from which he goes back to the sacred 
teachings of his childhood and the precious memories 


158 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


of his father and mother, with a soul ashamed,— 
which one of these sinners worries the most? ‘There 
are times when we ought to be ashamed not to be 
worried! 

An appalling symptom of the times in which we live 
is the worry, unnatural and fatal of little children. 
Among the children in some localities of continental 
Europe the suicide rate is said to be as high as among 
adults. Boys and girls scarcely out of their babyhood 
are found in despair. Hunger, undernourishment and 
all the hideous pre-natal influences of the war are now 
uniting to make moral monstrosities out of those who 
should be care-free and happy. Even here, in the great 
American cities, child life and the more advanced 
period of adolescence has taken on the abnormalities of 
pleasure which consort with vice. The sensitive na- 
tures of our immature sons and daughters are fed until 
they are sated with excitement and noise; they suffer 
from a moral overstrain that leaves them blasé and un- 
aroused in the presence of all that should make youth 
shout with joy and join with zest. Boys now become 
muscularly soft without ever having been physically 
hard and morally they harden without knowing the 
blessedness of childhood’s normal genuineness and 
sympathy. 

I have heard with disgust that was only exceeded 
by my grief, the story of schoolboys who refused to 
go out for basketball because it was too rough, or be- 
cause its practice hours interfered with afternoon hotel 
teas. These same lads had heard every loud cabaret 
joke on Broadway and are adepts along with the adult 
members of their families in defying the Constitution 
of the United States. Of course they have nothing to 
live for! Their future is behind them! 


WINNING OVER WORRY 159 


Somehow, the Church must in sweetness and light, 
but with courage and correction, minister in ways of 
largeness to the sons and daughters of the nation and 
with particular attention to the great and madly living 
cities. Here is a challenge we cannot evade. 

We need also to give attention to our educational 
programme. A good many tears have been shed 
over the handicaps suffered by the children of the 
pioneer wilderness who lacked the advantages of well- 
equipped classrooms, and who spent so meagre a time 
in school. But sometimes one finds the scholars of our 
generation who are in many ways so much more gener- 
ously treated, even more generously abused. Vividly 
remember the dainty little miss who by every claim 
of justice and hard work should have led her class, but 
to whom examinations were a chamber of nervous hor- 
rors and who never failed to become physically and 
mentally demoralised in the crucial hours at the end of 
each term. Wisely, with determination, as God-fearing 
child-loving Christian men and women we need to go 
after setting our educational, recreational and social 
house in order. 

But since we all are bound to have worries, what are 
we going to do about them? Beecher’s answer is hard 
to improve upon: “ Don’t dandle your worries on your 
knee, spank them and put them to bed.” Assume an 
aggressive attitude, take the offensive against worry, 
and always that means first of all cleaning out the 
‘““machine-gun nests” of the adversary! Locate his 
fire! Where does his fire come from? Imagination, 
weariness, or loose living, questionable practices, evil 
associations and bad habits? Are you doing your level 
best to merit relief from anxiety or are you a moral 
loafer? Sometimes I think that a moral loafer is more 


160 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


to be despised than a moral leper. Clean up, if you 
want worry to clear out! There is no other way. And 
remember God helps those who help themselves. You 
cannot win with worry. Are you anxious to win? 
Eager to reach the heights in your profession or your 
calling? You cannot win with worry—not the kind 
that you are yourself responsible for. And as God is 
true, I say to you tonight that if you keep faith, do 
your part, play the man, He will come out to you across 
the wildest sea of anxiety that ever blew a gale of fear 
and lift you as He lifted drowning Peter. 

How win over worry? I might say much and say 
infinitely less than these words which I find in an old 
Book my mother gave me: “ Trust in the Lord and 
do good,” or as it appears elsewhere in the same Book: 
“Rest in the Lord and wait patiently ”—and that rest 
in the Lord means literally ‘‘ Be careless in the Lord ” 
—hbe carefree, have no concern. One day a father was 
carrying his little girl high upon his shoulder. Her 
cheeks were blooming, her eyes dancing, her hair blow- 
ing, and her laughter singing like the water of a brook- 
let upon the pebbles of its course. ‘‘ Careful, careful,” 
playfully called out an observant visitor with mock 
caution, and the little one shouted down: “ Jse not 
afraid. He’s my Daddy!” Isaiah writes, “I will 
trust and not be afraid”; and no less a philosopher 
than Henry James wrote: “ The sovereign balm for 
worry ts religion.” We will not be afraid, we will not 
wotry, God is our Father. 

The caption of the leading article in one of our most 
popular magazines for the current month some time 
ago was “ The Happiest Person I Ever Knew.” It is 
from the pen of one of our most brilliant novelists. 
He writes of a great humorist, a great financier and 


WINNING OVER WORRY 161 


philanthropist, and another, a rich and influential man. 
He goes to the ends of the earth and then comes back 
to a log cabin of a Kentucky “ poor white,” to find his 
happiest person. “How could you keep yourself 
happy through these hard years? ” he asks the totter- 
ing woman wearing a shining face after years of child- 
bearing, years of poverty, years of hardship, and she 
replies: “‘ How could I help it, mister, with the love of 
God in my heart and the children to love and work 
for?” Love, work, faith—these are the words. Love, 
work, faith! Trust in the Lord and do good! 


XVI 
WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 


OT all who bear the name and outward forms 
and practices of Christianity meet with Christ’s 
approval. ‘There are some who wear the fine 

trappings of the Church, and stand in its places of 
trust, who will be repudiated in the final reckoning— 
repudiated, too, in the face of ardent protestations, 
and in spite of impressive achievements. ‘‘ Did we not 
prophesy, did we not prophesy, and in Thy Name? ” 
will be the reproachful plea, and there shall come the 
searching answer—‘ Yes, but prophecy without love is 
nothing.” ‘“ But did we not in Thy Name cast out 
devils? ” ‘“‘ Yes, and so did Judas.” ‘‘ Did we not do 
mighty works, many mighty works—all in Thy 
Name?” “ You did, but even though you had all 
faith so that you could have removed mountains, ye 
had not love—it profited you nothing.” God is not 
mocked, nor 1s He deceived. He has His standards, 
His unmistakable and clearly spoken conditions, and 
‘““he knoweth them that are his.” 

There is a great and grave distinction between re- 
ligion—mere religion—and Christianity. There are 
many religions in the world—some bad, others good. 
Christianity, which is the way and life of Jesus Christ, 
we find, by the test of experience and the record of 
history, to be supreme among religions. Religion is 
invariably man’s quest for God; its instinct, its im- 
pulse is universal. All men are religious—the cannibal 

162 


WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 1638 


who eats his victim and shares his gruesome feast with 
his priest; the atheist who makes his shrine from his 
denials, no less than the martyr who feeds the fire for 
his faith. Yes, religion is a universal impulse and 
instinct and invariably it is man’s quest for God. But 
Christianity is finding God. Nay, more: Christianity 
is finding God through, and in Jesus Christ. 

Practically, Christianity is a system both of faith 
and practice. It is hearing and doing; it is confession 
and expression. And it is more. Christianity is hear- 
ing and doing, but doing according to law—it is obedi- 
ence and the rule for its act is invariably a spiritual 
measurement, Whatever else abides, charity and love 
are first. My hands may be full, but, if my heart be 
empty my final examination is failure. It was not the 
widow’s mite that won the Master’s commendation; it 
was the widow’s spirit. The rich man’s failure was 
not in the thickness of his purse, but in the thinness 
of his soul. 

The religion that spoils morality is not Christianity, 
for the essence of morality is the spirit of a sermon 
preached upon a “ mount” and its dynamic is Jesus 
Christ. 

The religion that spoils morality is the religion that 
in any time cloaks its true purpose with an act of 
benevolence. It is the religion that with an ulterior 
motive, a sinister design, dispenses its benefactions— 
it is the open hand, the friendly voice, with the closed 
and evil heart. I have heard it in a squalid mill-town 
preaching the beauties of resignation and self-sacrifice 
to under-paid, poorly-housed labourers, not to make 
them happier and better, but to make a strike more 
remote. The religion that spoils morality is the re- 
ligion proclaiming much and practicing little—talking 


164 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


loudly and doing lewdly. A brilliant English novelist 
wrote books that were a model of social decorum, that 
breathed the atmosphere of the mid-Victorian period 
in which she reigned in the world of letters, but her 
manner of life was for years a direct contradiction of 
the marriage standards she glorified. She was re- 
ligious. She made even her sin a form of worship, but 
her religion was a convenience—it excused and encour- 
aged her manner of life—it spoiled morality. 

Religion has been in every age and with every race 
“good form.” It is always socially becoming. But 
the religion that merely builds a head rest for an 
Easter bonnet as well as the one that sets a grinning 
human skull upon the head of a naked, dancing savage 
is not Christianity. Marching down the broad aisle 
of a Fifth Avenue church, or writhing under the torrid 
skies of Africa, it spoils morality. Can you imagine 
Jesus turning away from the poor wreck of a man who 
has fallen under the power of some evil habit, who is 
crying out in the agony of remorse and repentance? 
Can you imagine Him turning away from such a social 
outcast, while he receives in the drawing-room of his 
favour the hardened sinner, the longtime reprobate 
whose only claim to distinction is the name his an- 
cestors achieved and the money he inherited? Here 
religion spoils morality. It takes more than a “May- 
flower ” pedigree and a family Bible that came over 
in the ‘‘ Half-Moon ” to make a man a member in full 
standing of the Church of God. David James Burrell 
once said, “‘ Some people die leaning up against their 
family trees,” and that holds morally and spiritually 
as well as physically. 

The woman taken in adultery was thrown upon the 
hard sand in front of Jesus by the ruling religion of 


WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 1685 


her day. The law of Moses would have given her a 
blanket of stones for her bed of death, but Jesus lifted 
her up and sent her away, repentant and forgiven— 
sent her away with two freedoms! King Herod in his 
adultery bought the silence of the priests, cut off the 
head of the wilderness prophet who condemned him, 
ruled his world with bloody hands under the walls of a 
temple, but the judgment of this same Jesus left him 
at last stripped and condemned. 

A sacred stone stands upon the sun-baked floor of 
a desert mesa. Far below the fields of over-ripened 
maze wait for harvesters who dance about that altar 
of their superstition in revolting antics of their ancient 
faith. They grapple with snakes; they fling them- 
selves down with incantations; they turn to sate their 
lust; they violate childhood in some of their baser 
festivals; they leave the fruits of their season’s labour 
to rot upon its roots; they impoverish themselves in 
body and soul—all in the name of religion, all in their 
search, their mad search, for God. There religion 
spoils morality. 

A beautiful Ohio grove has been fitted with tents. 
There is a central eating-place and a great tabernacle 
for public meetings. Leaders have come from all sec- 
tions of the continent and from far places of the world. 
Presently the night is made hideous with noises that 
for volume and vividness could scarcely be surpassed 
by the exercises of a primitive jungle-worship. Men 
and women, young and old, loose themselves in a 
frenzy that leads some beyond their last controls of 
will and reason. Designing persons join with innocent 
devotees; gibberish that could be heard nowhere else 
than in asylums for the insane is given the name of the 
Pentecostal outpouring that set cloven tongues of fire 


166 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


upon the heads of those who waited in the upper rooms 
of Jerusalem; homes are broken up; children are con- 
ceived and born out of wedlock; churches are divided; 
Christianity herself is for the moment compromised. 
All of this is religion, of sorts, but a religion that 
spoils morality. 

The Incas who murdered virgins in their sun- 
worship were religious. The Spaniards who murdered 
the Incas in their inquisitorial quests were religious. 
The Roman Church selling indulgences, offering to 
sanctify theft, adultery and murder for a price, was 
acting in the name of religion. The cathedral builders, 
who mixed their foundations with the blood of serfs 
and raised their walls with enforced labour, were . 
esthetically and often sublimely religious. The man 
who, today, crosses himself as he tosses a penny to 
the beggar who grovels on the entrance stones at 
Cologne, and who passes presently from the confes- 
sional to the office where he plans yet larger social sin, 
is religious. But the religion of these, of all of these, 
spoils morality. And—-remember—no dole given to 
the poor, no charity dispensed to unfortunate victims, 
no prophetic utterance, no mighty work of individual 
faith or public benefaction, will ever make one of 
those who knew the truth and refused its larger free- 
dom immune to the “ Depart from me, I know you 
not ’’ of Jesus Christ. 

Two great temptations face us—face us all, today. 
First, the temptation to shallow religious thinking; to 
thinking which makes no distinction between religion 
and Christianity; to thinking which so mixes candles 
and robes and beads and sermons and poor boxes and 
church attendance, with the allegiance of the soul to 
God and the commitment of the life to His service, that 


WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 167 


these come to stand, the outward for the inward, the 
less important, however worthy, for the absolutely 
vital. Men who are most exacting in their business 
standards, who would not countenance for an instant | 
a financial defalcation, pass over lightly their vow of 
church membership and the breaking of their covenant 
with Christ to “ love the Lord with all their heart, and 
their neighbour as themselves.”’ It would be a mistake 
to say that they are not religious. They are, but as 
Christians their thinking is shallow and their practice 
is a contradiction. | 

We face a second great temptation today—the 
temptation of falling into the error of satisfying our- 
selves with feeling, of becoming complacent because of 
Christian emotions that have no issue in deeds. We 
are hearers of the word. We even weep under its burn- 
ing message, or we rejoice in its anticipated triumph of 
righteousness—then powder our nose, or compose our 
countenance and with the feeling of war-weary veter- 
ans fall into the sleep that we fancy is the repose of 
the just. But a fancy and nothing more it is. Worse 
off we are for all our emotional dissipation—worse off 
than we were before. Feeling a little, we have de- 
luded ourselves in the belief that we have done a lot. 
Religious we are, to be sure, but not Christ-like, for 
to be like Christ we must be “doers of the word 
also.” Nero wept and blubbered in maudlin grief 
while he belaboured his fiddle with a thick thumb and 
bemoaned in doggerel verse the city he had given to 
the torch! 

On the other hand, I know a young woman who 
attended a Christian Endeavour Convention and was 
deeply moved by an address that described the failure 
of many a local church because of the inability of the 


168 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


pastor and the officials to find persons willing to give 
leadership to the children of junior age. Suddenly the 
conviction came to her as she thought of her own com- 
munity and church, that she was the responsible party; 
that she held the key to the situation; that, instead of 
stopping with her first emotional concern, or returning 
to try to find a leader, she should go back and offer 
herself. She followed her conviction. She con- 
quered this temptation we are talking about and 
entered timidly, but with growing confidence and 
power, upon a career that really changed the life of 
youth in her village and gave her finally a message 
for a great state. 

What are we doing today about our grey-haired 
covenant to end war? Will we confine our efforts to 
shedding tears at memorial services and feeling intense 
indignation when we read a stirring article or listen to 
an eloquent sermon arraigning armed conflict? Is this 
our anti-war programme and nothing more? Unless we 
are relating ourselves by petition and vote and the 
dedication of our every influence to the sane cam- 
paigns for a World Court, disarmament by agreement, 
and that association of nations which will offer the 
world a working plan instead of a mad play with ever 
suspicious chance, we are far from the standards set 
by Jesus for His followers. Tempted, we are to fall 
into silence and inactivity between the two extremes— 
the one of pacifism and non-resistance and the other 
of untaught and unlearning militarism. 

With unmistakable emphasis Jesus declares that we 
prove our title to the Kingdom, that we win our way 
with Him—by obedience. Not by prophesying, not by 
the casting out devils, not by doing mighty deeds, not 
by these alone, but by obedience. Not by knowing 


WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 169 


nor by doing, but by knowing and by doing in obedi- 
ence to His command and spirit. A signboard points 
out the road it never travels. A preacher may declare 
with an eloquence that sways the multitude a truth he 
has never experienced. Even a traitor uses the uni- 
form and the language of a patriot. So is it with all 
who say “ Lord, Lord ”—and stop. 

There is a practical lesson for us all here, particu- 
larly for those of us who have life’s larger portion—so 
far as human eyes may see—before us. While travel- 
ing in the St. Gaudens and Winston Churchill country 
of New England, I inquired, at a wayside house, the 
distance to a certain village. ‘‘ Just over yon hill, 
sir,” the old lady said, “ but I’ve never seen it.” She 
knew the way,—that I proved a little later—but she 
had never taken it. She was only a signboard when 
she might have been more. The old master turns to 
his young pupil and inspires her with the commenda- 
tion: “ A glorious organ God has given you. But you 
must work! ” he also cries. ‘“‘ Beyond are the heights, 
but you must climb and the way is hard and steep and 
long.” And within her soul the young girl feels the 
surge of mysterious latent powers; finds the confirma- 
tion of the teacher’s prophecy—bui the hill! Beyond 
is triumph, adulation, glory, but the hill! The world 
never hears the voice that God imprisoned in her soul, 
for hard work to release. She never reached the great 
beyond because she never climbed the hill. 

When America’s brilliant Olympic team sailed for 
France to meet the finest athletes of the world, I 
seemed to see again the most versatile runner I ever 
knew. I believe that he was, by the physical endow- 
ments of nature, one of the fastest humans that ever 
drew on a sprinter’s “ spikes.” The winners of two 


170 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Olympiads felt in the “ century ” and in the hurdles the 
sting of his dust as training days lengthened toward 
the great ordeal. He knew the way! He had match- 
less potential powers, but “ Just over yon hill,” I hear 
the old woman saying again, “ Just over yon hill, 
I’ve never seen it.”” He might have left his name upon 
the record books of the world, but he remained a guide- 
post that lesser athletes followed who went on ahead 
to attain great glory. - 

Young man, young woman, in the first flush of your 
ambition, or facing one of these great temptations we 
have been talking about; beginning, just beginning 
perhaps that course in spiritual sophistry which New 
York opens so many classes to; half persuaded to take 
a fling at something which with a fair promise and 
holy name spoils morality—remember the formula! 
Faith and works with obedience! Accept no spurious 
substitute! And—climb the hill! 

Finally: the religion that spoils morality does not 
survive the test of time—does not last. Each gener- 
ation sees the fault in the cathedral-builders more 
clearly than tourists see now the cracks in Westminster 
Abbey. The jungle-worship of a thousand years stag- 
gers where it does not fall, before the educational and 
medical programme of a century of Christian missions. 
The Inca Temple of the Sun is a ruin. Cortez and his 
contemporaries with their baptism into death are 
buried deeper than any pirate’s lost treasure. Today 
no Pope would sell an indulgence for an empire. But 
Christ lives! Christianity increases! 

In the innermost chamber of the individual life God 
is by the sure, however slow progress of His regener- 
ating truth, perfecting a people to serve Him, fash- 
ioning man into His spiritual likeness. In all of 


WHEN RELIGION SPOILS MORALITY 171 


organised society, coming daily into closer grips with 
civilisation’s refinements of selfishness and cruelty, He 
is creating the better world: He is building toward that 
new era—the era of the soul. 


XVII 
THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 


ELF-CONFIDENCE is a very great danger. 
S True preparation, for an individual and for 

church is not in boastfulness, but in watchful- 
ness; not in pride of fancied prowess, but in simple 
piety and prayer. 

With a small company of friends I once climbed 
Mount Hood in the Oregon Cascades. I am still 
measuring some of the lessons learned that day and 
few of them fail to give emphasis to the sound admoni- 
tion, “‘ Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed 
lest he fall.” 

All men and women are climbers, that is to say, they 
should be climbers; and they are, unless they are 
clingers. Something is radically wrong with the per- 
son who is satisfied to remain in a status quo, with the 
lad who has no desire to get beyond the reach of his 
father’s protecting arm, or the girl who has no desire 
to get beyond the sound of her mother’s dear voice. 
There is a divine beauty in the face of the young 
woman who, in sublime ignorance of the dangers before 
her, turns eagerly from her home-village to New York; 
a veritable glory from the new heaven and the new 
earth transfigures the countenance of the youth who, 
blissfully unaware of the disillusionments in front of 
him, whistles through the homestead-gate to go 
a-wooing Destiny. To these I especially address my- 
self, and I would begin by repeating once more the 


172 


THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 173 


great words of Paul: ‘Let him that thinketh he 
standeth, take heed lest he fall.” 

First of all, my young friend, if you are going to 
climb a mountain, select a real one. Do not waste 
your time and strength on less than the highest though 
you will discover that there are many intervening 
ridges to be conquered before you reach your crowning 
peak. Name as that peak nothing less than the first 
monarch of the range! 

For years I watched, through my father’s window, 
the lights and shadows play upon the white head of 
that monarch of western mountains—Mount Hood. 
Always I longed to plant my feet upon its topmost pin- 
nacle; but my ambition went unrealised until a son 
was old enough to scramble up its last ascent—just 
ahead of me. There were lesser peaks that I could 
have negotiated, lesser peaks much nearer and no 
doubt the prospect would have been worth while, but 
the lure of the greater took away all zest for the lesser. 

Perhaps one may need to be cautioned against 
despising the lesser. Certainly the hills have exquisite 
rewards of their own, that make even a mountain 
envious, but “ hitch your wagon to a star ”’ is just an- 
other way of saying: ‘“‘ When you set out to climb a 
mountain, select a real one; make your goal the 
highest.” 

Now that we have begun our climb, first, what are 
our perils and then what are our safeties? An En- 
glishman with his guide beginning the last stretch of a 
famous Alpine ascent, remarked, “ The way to the top 
seems open to all,” and the answer was, ‘“‘ Yes, anyone 
can go out to go up, but not all who go out, get up; and 
not all who get up, get back! ” And not all who reach 
New York, young people, get up and not all get back! 


174 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


One difficulty with some who climb a mountain for 
the first time is that they place their confidence in 
strength that, while it has never failed them before, 
has never before met the mountain’s test. In our 
party the only man who collapsed on the last and 
stiffest five hundred feet of the climb was, muscularly, 
possibly the strongest man of the group. Cramps 
seized him and he fainted, and collapsed under the 
rope against the anchor man. 

If you are bound for the heights, you will need more 
stamina than you have ever yet called upon. Not 
every .400 batter in the bush league makes good in the 
majors, by any means. Over-confidence is a handicap 
anywhere—in the valley as well as on the mountain; in 
New York as well as in the small village. 

“Hey, look at me!” called an impetuous fellow 
who, against insistent admonitions from two guides, 
had pressed out to the extreme point of an ice-ledge 
that half-arched a Swiss crevasse. His friends looked, 
but anxiety turned quickly to horror as the place where 
he stood broke from its precarious hold upon the 
mountain and he went hurtling to death in an un- 
plumbed chasm. 

‘“‘ Hey, look at me! ” was Peter’s cry, when he swore 
that though all others deserted he would remain true 
to his Lord. But the high priest’s fowl had not 
crowed thrice before he had gone plunging into the 
abyss of denial and shame. 

“Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest 
he fall.” 

Another has said that “ danger comes soonest when 
it is despised.”” Mountain guides fear the reckless 
members of a party far more than they do the timid. 
Young people, this city is no safe footing for anyone 


THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 175 


who walks carelessly, and, hear me! If you have 
come thus far without a guide, remember the heavier 
grades are in front—the steeper ascents, the more fear- 
some dangers. Don’t go on alone! Did I say, young 
people? But what I said is no less a true word for all 
others. Don’t go on without a guide. On Mount Hood 
that day we found our supreme test in the last five 
hundred feet of the eight miles. Failure there would 
have meant complete defeat. 

A distinguished European minister who was to ad- 
dress a great audience in the then but recently com- 
pleted Wisconsin State Capitol building, had been 
seated in a huge speaker’s chair, which had not been 
securely anchored to the floor. As he arose to address 
his audience, the chair toppled over, carrying him with 
it. Wildly his feet churned the air and helplessly he 
struggled until friends came to his rescue. His first 
words were particularly apropos. To the delight of 
his youthful hearers he declared: “‘ Let him that think- 
eth he standeth, take heed lest he fall.””’ Then, with 
just a slight pause, he concluded: ‘“‘ The foundation of 
the Lord standeth sure.” 

In climbing a mountain, there is the sudden peril of 
the high wind; the uncertainty of the updraft. That 
day on Mount Hood I found a dead grasshopper at an 
elevation of ten thousand feet and on the descent a 
hapless robin went screaming by in terror, an un- 
willing victim of the storm that had carried it from the 
protecting trees of the valley below. For us all there 
are sudden gusts of passion and appetite, or wild gales 
of disaster that carry us off our feet. 

New York has many more dangerous corners than 
the point of the historic “ Flatiron” Building. One 
Sunday evening a man whose name was once a proud 


176 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


one in this city, reeled into our church and against 
my study door just ten minutes before I must be in 
the pulpit. An ancient sin, a grey-haired appetite, 
caught him in the whirl of its updraft when his busi- 
ness tumbled into ruins. 

Then there is the peril of looking. During my 
mountain-climb, and as I lay in the lee of a great rock 
that half-sheltered me, watching the men on the rope 
below, I had no knowledge of what was just behind 
me. But when I turned and rounded the last ledge 
grasping firmly the securely anchored guide-rope, I 
discovered that my feet had been hanging over a sheer 
drop of three thousand feet. I closed my eyes, stopped 
thinking, and plunged on! Peril in looking! Peril in 
thinking! Peril in stopping! Straight ahead in that 
last ordeal on the mountain; straight ahead without 
looking down; straight ahead through the full fury of 
the storm, or rapidly numbing hands will loose their 
hold, blood will congeal, and always freezing men 
must fall! 

And here is a call to us all. Do not tarry in the 
slippery places of sin; do not look into these moral 
abysses that are deeper and more fearsome than the 
northern precipice of Mount Hood. Straight ahead, 
then, by God’s eternal grace, towards the heights as 
when dreams were as sweet as the new-mown hay of 
our father’s meadows, when your ambitions were as 
true as your mother’s prayer! 

Perhaps the greatest peril in mountain-climbing is 
the peril already indicated,—but not directly declared, 
—the peril of despising danger. “ He only is safe from 
danger who is on guard when he is safe.” A brave 
man never despises danger. Someone has said that 
‘danger frightens a timid person before it happens; a 


THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 177 


coward while it happens, and a hero after it happens.” 
But the guide who, knowing that even a shrill cry may 
start an avalanche, again and again whispers a warn- 
ing to the careless fellow behind him is not the coward 
of the party. 

I once saw a French brigadier-general who waited 
with his orderly in General Pershing’s outer office in 
Chaumont, leap with an excited exclamation from his 
chair when a hand-grenade of the offensive variety 
tumbled from a table. He knew what potential power 
for disaster that grenade held beneath its checkered, 
ribbed steel. 

Don’t laugh at moral risks, young man, and don’t 
take them alone. There are worse avalanches here- 
abouts than ever buried an Alpine village. 

A climber’s safety is so closely associated with his 
danger that some things are both perils and protec- 
tions; both enemies and friends. The winds that 
scream about the upflung portions of the earth are not 
unmitigated evils—they sweep the narrow ledges of 
the loose granite that rolls treacherously beneath the 
climber’s feet, and on the steeper portions of the 
glacier they keep the ice-pack free of the light snow 
that is ever a great menace. Mountains are all in a 
slow but continuous process of disintegration and 
those who take their way upon them stand in slippery 
places. The mighty winds keep one alert, at attention; 
every step is against pressure; there is no time to 
relax; no temptation to let down, until the shelter- 
house on the summit is reached. Ah! and a glorious 
thing it is to triumph over opposition, to win against 
the wind! Dr. Burrell once said, ‘‘ Let me take 
heaven with the wind in my face.” Let me take heaven 
with the wind in my face! 


178 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


And there is safety in the night. We began the 
second and last four miles of our climb of Mount 
Hood at three o’clock in the morning—under the stars 
and moon. The trail was hard as granite at that hour. 
Even on the highest mountain at midday, surface ice 
and snow melts just enough to make treacherous foot- 
ing. Always other ways there are that to an inexperi- 
enced eye are better than the one the guide is holding 
to, but on a great mountain the wrong trail may have 
only a step to go to reach disaster. ‘‘ There is a way 
that seemeth good to a man, but the end thereof is 
death.” aye 

Had we not begun our climb in the night, we 
should have missed the sunrise on the mountain. Are 
not the songs that linger longest those that “ came 
upon the midnight clear? ”—-when weary heads are 
tossed by pain and anguished hearts by grief’s dark 
mystery are holden, “ He giveth songs in the night.” 

And just as there is safety in facing danger, in 
meeting head-on the winds of risk, just as there are 
times when coasting vessels put out to meet a storm, 
head off-shore to find sea-room, so there are other occa- 
sions when mountain climbers must turn back or be 
overcome, and when ships, to avert disaster, must turn 
and run before the tempest. Braver and more re- 
sourceful men never started for a summit than have 
twice been baffled by Mount Everest. They could 
have persisted and died, as well as failed of their 


objective. ‘‘ But he who fights and runs away, may 


live to fight another day.” 

In the supreme conflicts with temptation, there are 
moments when the only safety is in flight. He is a 
moral coward who does not, when the circumstance 
demands, turn and run from evil. Joseph, who es- 


eo “ 
ee SC Se ee ee 





THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY 179 


caped precipitously from his master’s house, was 
braver than Samson who lingered in the brothel of a 
heathen city. 

In any case, in a circumstance of either sort, whether 
the climb be moral or physical, the climber must have 
determination—the unyielding purpose, the will to do. 
My friend, of whom I shall write again here, who 
remained at the snow-line, had it just as truly as 
my other friend who, when the final test came and he 
was dizzy and sick and half-blind, pressed on, stag- 
gered forward, crawled inch by inch up the great rope. 


“You were beaten to earth? Well, what of that? 
Come up with a smiling face. 
It’s nothing against you to fall down flat; 
To lie there,—that’s desgrace.” 


In other words—with a single exception—the 
climber’s safety is in no one else so supremely as in 
himself. He makes or breaks the application of every 
sound mountain rule. In his willingness to respond 
promptly to the instructions of the guide lies security 
for himself and for the entire party. If he runs “ yel- 
low’ in a crisis, if he fails of a fighting spirit, the 
whole plan of campaign must be revised and fre- 
quently the ascent must be abandoned. The rarest 
fruits of Persian gardens adorn the table of those who 
have not even soiled their evening clothes to procure 
them, but the summit of a mountain never comes to 
any man who does not take it for himself. Destiny is 
not a word—it is a work. | 

I said that, with a single exception, the climber’s 
safety is in himself supremely. The exception is the 
guide. I may have the stamina of a Marathon runner; 


180 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


the strength of a Hercules; the heart of a Coeur-de- 
Lion, and the native genius of a lad born in the Alps, 
but if I take the trail to the heights alone, I walk with 
death—my trip is a gamble, a fool’s risk and not an 
honest adventure. 

Take a guide in your climb to the heights. Ah! take 
the guide in your climb to the heights! Are you climb- 
ing alone, struggling upward on life’s storm-swept 
trail—battling sin and pain and doubt and grief? Are 
you fighting forward inch by inch or losing ground,— 
alone? Take the guide,—the Guide who says: “I will 
guide you into all truth—I am the Way.” 

If it be true that a chain is only as strong as its 
weakest link, it is equally true that a climbing party is 
only as strong as its frailest member. Many a moun- 
tain adventure has come to disaster because of one 
weakling, or one man who for the moment was under 
his physical par. In our Mount Hood group was one 
of the writer’s lifelong friends who, also, had waited 
for years to satisfy his boyhood ambition to scale the 
last pinnacle of Mount Hood. Long experienced in 
mountain work, on intimate terms with every detail of 
the west’s great out-of-doors, he was inexpressibly 
chagrined when a sudden seizure, accentuated perhaps 
by mountain-sickness, left him staggering in his tracks. 
He reached the snow-line cabin weak and haggard; the 
few hours before the morning starting time at three 
o’clock brought him only partial relief. As we shiv- 
ered about the fire in the high darkness, he startled us 
into quick protests by quietly announcing that he 
would not attempt to go farther—that he would remain 
at the cabin and wait our return. And that was what 
he did. Rather than run the risk of spoiling the great 
experience for others, rather than put his weakness as 


THE CLIMBER’S PERIL AND SAFETY § 18] 


a handicap upon his friends, he accepted one of the 
great disappointments of his life,—did a harder thing 
than any other man did upon the storm-swept peak 
that day. When we came plunging down across the 
great snow-fields that afternoon, he had a comforting 
fire going and we found our soaked and frozen clothing 
of the night before, dry and warm. No man of us 
doubted who had climbed the high mountain. There 
are times when it is much easier to go than it is to 
stay—always the hardest thing is ‘“ just to wait.” 
Unselfishness is the finest virtue. 

As I think of that whole experience now, two things 
make it worth while. The satisfaction of achievement 
and the glory of the vision—the inexpressible thrill 
that came when we stood upon that storm-swept sum- 
mit and the exaltation that was akin to rapture with 
which through sudden windows in the madly driven 
clouds we looked down upon the world. 

Below us were the glaciers and the shelving, sliding 
granite; the crater with its smoke and fumes; the dizzy 
stretches of blinding snow; the fighting climb that we 
had taken, yard by yard, then foot by foot, then inch 
by inch; the appalling precipice, the vast abyss. Be- 
hind us were those moments when we had all but failed 
—when the rising storm had sent us to our faces and all 
but to defeat. But we had reached our goal! Ours was 
the satisfaction of achievement and the joy of triumph. 

Ah! you have known it, too,—in school, in sport, in 
business, in friendship, in love, in self-renunciations 
for God, for country, for fallen man. This it was that 
made us kings in our souls as we stood upon the hoary 
head of Mount Hood and this it was that made my 
friend no less a king, who stood beside the fire below 
the clouds. 


182 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


Then the vision that grew as dawn came on apace— 
the sun like a galleon of gold rising out of the east and 
cleaving the earlier clouds, which were as the spray of 
a sapphire sea. The deep blues and purples below 
taking fire and the emerald hills sifted through flame. 
The white peaks far to the south like enchanted isles 
in a billowing ocean twixt heaven and earth. The 
river-ways like trails of silver for the spirit feet of the 
mountains and the lakes with the mists rising from 
them like steaming cups of the gods. Then darkness 
again; the great curtain rolled down by the storm, the 
battle with sleet, the grips with the wind, the supreme 
test—and then the break of new day, with the glory 
unutterable of the sun riding high above the clouds 
that heaved now and raged like a passionate beast at 
our feet. 

And you who have never stood upon a mountain 
summit have known the exultation of enraptured 
vision, for you have seen the night of sin shot through 
by the Sun of righteousness; you have waited where 
the dawn approached through a vale of tears and you 
have climbed the rocky steeps through winds that blew 
disaster, to greet the resurrection morning that takes 
its glory from the face of a Risen Lord. 


XVITI 


WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 


a man may take with him, when he passes from 

this life—moves from time into eternity—he 
does not take earthly treasures or physical possessions. 
He leaves behind his houses and lands; his cattle and 
ships; his gold and his bonds. Naked he comes and 
naked he goes. ‘ There is no pocket in a shroud.” 

The ancient Egyptian left chariots and furniture, 
robes and food and the insignia of authority in the 
tomb of his king. But six thousand years after he 
closed the door, we find them where he left them. The 
Indian swung his dead above the desert or buried them 
in the crevice of the precipice or beneath rocks. He 
provisioned them for a long journey and armed them 
to meet the enemies of the way. But where bodies 
have ages since returned to the dust, we gather the 
bows and arrows that were never used. 

No, when we answer the last summons, we drop our 
tools, never to lift them again; leave our strong-boxes, 
never to open them more and embark upon a journey 
that calls for neither food nor drink. 

This unescapable fact leads man to one of two con- 
clusions: “ Take thine ease: eat, drink and be merry,”’ 
or “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of 
the things ‘which he possesseth.”” Of one who came to 
the former conclusion, a wiser than you or [I said, 
“Thou fool.” 


fa ese is no denying the fact that whatever else 


183 


184 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


But it must be granted that a great multitude prac- 
tice the principle upon which a certain rich man pur- 
posed spending the remainder of his earthly life. They 
say: “ We are going to be a long time dead, let us lose 
no time now in enjoying the things the grave forever 
separates us from. Let joy be unrestrained and selfish- 
ness master and appetite king.” 

The trouble with the decision is that it is a deceiver, 
for man can never be satisfied with things. Satisfac- 
tion never comes with the mere gratification of the 
sensual and the physical. Things have their place and 
a large place it is indeed in the programme of human 
existence, but always food and drink and their physical 
synonyms should be the means to a greater and hap- 
pier end; always they must be supplemented and com- 
pleted, to create healthy bodies and souls. Unaided, 
they dissipate the very satisfaction they promise. 

The rich man to whom we have referred, with his 
eyes full of his riches and his mind crowded with plans 
for greater barns, addressed his soul like a feudal bene- 
factor, and said, “‘ Soul, take thine ease.” But not 
even kis soul could obey. Already he had robbed his 
soul to pay his carpenters and builders. Soul, take 
thine ease! But a troubled bed he took, instead. 

Rest and peace have never yet been purchased. 
They must first be earned and then they come as the 
priceless gifts of God. Few men if any have ever 
earned them while devoting their energies to harvest- 
ing their own crops and building store-houses to care 
for some selfish increase. No man has ever come upon 
them while taking a whirl with dissipation to keep 
ahead of the grave. 

Don’t be the slave of things! Few of you will ever 
be tempted by the more brutish and sensual things, 


WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 185 


perhaps. But there are few if any of us who live in 
those serene places that are above the call of houses 
and lands. Don’t be the slave of things! The rich 
man’s moral decay was evidenced by the way in which 
he talked about his stable and gloated over his fields. 
There is nothing in the lesson to indicate that he gave 
his poor neighbour a single thought. To the contrary, 
he was counting on a long rest with no hurry calls of 
mercy to disturb his enjoyment. Had he been increas- 
ing his storage room with famine-stricken Egypt in 
mind and had he been rejoicing in his increase because 
of what the surplus would mean to the hungry Samari- 
tans, the strictures that follow his valedictory would 
not have been spoken. | 

“There is nothing on earth that looks good, that is 
so dangerous for a man, or a nation, to handle, as 
quick, easy, big money. If it does not get you, the 
chances are that it will get your son. It is greater and 
finer heroism to dare to be poor in America than It is 
to charge earthinks.” Thus saith “ The Wall Street 
Journal! ” The late William James recognised the 
same menace and came to feel that it was again time to 
take a vow of poverty, like unto the vow of Francis 
of Assisi. | 

Again and again we hear it said, that the poor are 
more generous as a class than the rich, and Jesus in- 
directly suggested as much in the parable of the widow 
and her mite. 

Perhaps the poor are as a class more general gener- 
ous because their own physical needs are so constantly 
apparent. Also when a need is supplied its very supply 
is a suggestion to gratitude. There can be no true 
generosity without feeling, and because the “rich” 
man had all of his own physical needs supplied and had 


186 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


been completely engrossed in his efforts to supply them, 
he had completely forgotten his less fortunate brethren. 
Perhaps he was unfortunate in that he lacked the re- 
minder his poor neighbour was never without. 

It takes a truly big individual to be both rich and 
righteous. Most of us are not nearly big enough and 
some of us have difficulty to be as righteous as we 
ought to be, even though we are unhandicapped by 
houses and lands. 

The testimony of a very dear friend of mine who is 
very rich, whose possessions would make him an inter- 
nationalist, had his great and generous heart not 
already done so, is this: ‘“‘ The only way to be both 
happy and rich is to look upon what you have, with 
the eyes of a steward and to live as a distributor 
for God.” 

What does a man take with him? Only what he has 
given. 


“TI reckon him greater than any man 
That ever drew sword in war; 
I reckon him greater than king or khan, 
Braver and better by far. 


“And wisest in this whole wide land 
Of hoarding till bent and gray:— 
For all you can hold in your cold, dead hand 
Is what you have given away.” 


Let no one of us delude himself. We are all tempted 
and at times desperately tempted to fall into the error 
of the rich man and some of us with far less excuse 
than he had. We must all fight against covetousness; 
against falling into a wrong attitude toward physical 
_things and sensual. Don’t be the slave of things! Be 


WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 187 


the master. And Deker it was who said, “ When all 
other sins are old in us and go about on crutches, cov- 
etousness does but then lie in her cradle! ” 

Let us begin to practice generosity now. ‘“ Those 
who do not give until they die,’ said Bishop Hall, 
“show that they would not then if they could have 
kept it any longer!” But let us give time as well as 
money. The rich man of the famous parable was a 
miser with his hours as well as with his money. He 
planned to squander both upon himself. The majority 
of us will not be greatly affected by any great appeal 
for funds—we could not be. Our exchequers are de- 
pleted or rather they were never full and have been 
ever small. But we are as crowded for time as the 
millionaire is crowded with funds. It is as hard for us 
to give a minute to the church as it is for a miser to 
give a mite. 

Begin practicing generosity now! Young people, 
draw away resolutely from the suggestion that you are 
too busy to give a portion of your week and regularly, 
to some service that relates you to God’s great ministry 
of making a brighter, a better, a kindlier, a happier, a 
more considerate world. 

What is the remedy for the astigmatism that makes 
a person blind to the only road that leads to ease of 
soul and happiness? What is the remedy that. will 
cure those who have the disease that was the sudden 
death of the man of the parable? The only sovereign 
remedy that I know is to give Jesus Christ the pre- 
eminence in our hearts and the service of others the 
first place in our lives. ‘‘ Then shall we undervalue all 
temporal things in comparison with Him.” 

But what does a man take with him? And just as 
there is no denying the fact that he does not take 


188 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


earthly treasures and physical possessions so it 1s un- 
questionably the fact that anything he does take is of 
the quality and essence of his own immortal soul. 
That which he takes is as that which goes and not a 
single hair of his physical head, nor the tiniest portion 
of his fleshly being may ever pass from the grim cham- 
ber to which they bear his human form. Only the soul 
may pass—‘ that vital spark of heavenly flame.” 
Thus is a single soul richer than all worlds. 


“Our thoughts are boundless, though our lsmbs 
are frail; 
Our soul immortal, though our limbs decay; 
Though darkened is this poor Isfe by a veil 
Of suffering, dying matter; we shall play 
In truth’s eternal sunbeams:” 


Another has said that “life is but the soul’s nur- 
sery.” Then the supreme business of society, of school 
and government as well as of the church is certainly 
the training not of bodies and of minds, but of souls,— 
souls that never die. Souls that even as the sprout of 
an acorn is bent by the hindrances of its environment, 
or strengthened by rich soil and favouring winds, may 
take its eternal direction from the surroundings of its 
childhood and the training of its youth. 

True wealth is soul wealth and to these riches we 
all may aspire. As to its measurement, I have found 
the test of the wise man who said, ‘“‘ The wealth of a 
soul is measured by how much it can feel and its 
poverty by how little,’ a very good one. One danger 
is that we shall become spiritually numb, so great are 
the human tragedies about us, so appalling, so colossal 
the physical and spiritual pain. ~ ) 


WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 189 


The morning when the little city of my youth was 
stricken as with a personal grief because one little boy 
had been swept to his death among the old pilings of 
the swimming-hole, seems infinitely far away. Now 
ten thousand little boys may lie with their sisters under 
the weeping skies of far Japan and children of the 
Adriatic may wait in terror lest the guns again shall 
speak their death. How much do we feel? How much 
have we given? 

But what does a man take with him? There is that 
which does not remain here when eyes lose their lustre, 
hands their strength and speech its melody. With rare 
beauty and understanding Barry Cornwall wrote, 
‘Where are Shakespeare’s imagination, Bacon’s learn- 
ing, old Galileo’s dream? Where is the sweet fancy 
of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton’s 
thought severe? Methinks such things should not die 
and dissipate when a brick of Egypt will last three 
thousand years.” 

It is the wealth of soul, the treasures of the spirit 
that need ‘“‘ no pocket in a shroud,” which go with man. 
Nor can we be placated with things however much we 
may need them; however vital they may be when made 
to serve and not allowed to enslave. 

A little while ago a strong man died—a man who 
had been a worker in wood and a genius in the homely 
virtues of the Christian fireside. Late in life financial 
disaster had overtaken him and the toil of years of 
sacrifice turned back to the beginning. But his spirit 
had remained unbroken as his head, now snowy white, 
had remained unbowed. He had gone on steadfastly 
to the quiet end. I walked with his son among the 
trees of his planting, in the lawn he had kept with 
assiduous care and found no tree missing—he had left 


190 AN ADVENTURE IN EVANGELISM 


them all. We came to the barn, took the lock from the 
door he had swung and stood before the great chest 
of tools he had used with the genius of his craftsman- 
ship. As the son held them in his hands one by one 
and lifted again ere we turned away the shining ham- 
mer his father’s hand had closed upon, not one was 
missing. 

We came to the house of deep, though quiet mourn- 
ing. In every room were the masterpieces of his skill, 
—the mantels and the chests, the cases filled with 
books, the hardwood floors—cunningly devised in col- 
oured woods—and so closely joined that they looked 
like stone mosaics from some Moorish palace in old 
Spain. In the attic, stored away, were children’s toys, 
—his heart was ever young. None of these were gone! 
In the closets hung his garments and on the stand his 
Bible lay with his glasses by. But he had left them 
all! He was gone. 

What had he taken with hime He who was no 
longer peering out from beneath those bushy brows or 
smiling up from the now so strangely placid face? He 
was not there—he was gone. What had he taken with 
hime And I had my answer to the question in the 
faces of the people even before the preacher spoke. 
What had he taken with him? ‘This man who left 
behind his tools and all the treasures of his hands? He 
had taken love and friendship, esteem and truth,— 
every fine sentiment of his generous heart had been 
gathered up when his last journey began and not one 
unselfish thought had been forgotten. He went com- 
panioned by the tender recollections of the children 
who had ridden high upon his knees, and whose baby 
fingers had been tangled in his beard. He walked 
forth without a smudge of shame. He swept across 


WHAT A MAN TAKES WITH HIM 191 


the portal of his humble home arrayed in honour and 
clothed with peace. 

These are the things that last! These treasures of 
the heart; these riches of the soul—these are the gifts 
against which the gate of Death will never close. 


“°Tis true; *tis certain; man though dead retains 
Part of himself ;—the immortal mind remains.” 


THE END 


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